Clasen: GNOME 3.7 at the halfway mark

You don't seem to understand the package review process. FESCo is not involved. All it takes is one package maintainer to review and approve and it is typically upto him or her to determine packaging quality and only that. We don't typically ask the question why at all as part of the review process. Ours concern are usually limited to maintenance and sustainability. They can appeal to Fedora packaging committee to determine whether it conflicts with the packaging guidelines and in this case, there was a request to FPC and they determined that Cinnamon didn't conflict. The relevant packaging guidelines are at

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:No_Bundled_Libra...

There is really nothing stopping an older version of GCC from going in and Fedora does that now and then for compatibility. Fedora repositories have a lot of forked components and they are accepted on a routine basis. If a forked version of GCC gets submitted for review, it takes just one maintainer to review and approve it unless someone objects and in that case, it is upto FPC and they might escalate all the way to FESCo or even Fedora Board but such instances are very rare.