Reality check

Something that's been bothering me about this is I thought RMS lost his "overlord" role with GCC with the former split and that the only software he still only had any real control over (as in project dictator/director/decision maker) was emacs.

It would seem my memory of history is either distorted or out of date because he must have a role or no one would be consulting him about what GCC can do. (as google is failing me here) Is RMS still the main decision maker for GCC these days or hold a key decision making role? Because I thought the whole egcc split thing sidelined him into an advisory role when they re-merged.

Honestly if he's so out of date that he's never even used C++ he really shouldn't be in any management role for software which is used in programming, either GCC or emacs for that matter. To provide a car analogy, I wouldn't find myself qualified to design race tracks if the only thing I'd ever driven was a go-cart (or vice-versa if you don't like C++ being the race track). The differences between programming 20 years ago and today are vast and if you haven't stayed up to date you don't even really know what the issues are let alone the proper feature set.

Don't get me wrong, I like RMS. Free software needs an uncompromising evangelist to keep the movement steered towards the goals. But that doesn't mean he needs to be making feature decisions on a software package if his knowledge and actual programming experience is dated.