Toward a "modern" Emacs

> This is a gross misunderstanding of the GPL, and of copyright law generally. ... While the GPL may have been intended to give rights to end users, that is not what it actually does,

So, yeah, if you want what the GPL was intended to give you, it doesn't seem a gross misunderstanding of the GPL to expect that.

> No promise was ever made to any end users, so there is nothing for them to demand in the first place. ... People can use the same license to very different ends.

It seems you're making RMS's case for him. Above you say:

> You have the code, it is fully GPL-compliant, and (as a result) it's already licensed under the same terms as upstream.

But then you say that functionally it's licensed under very different terms, that functionally an end user has no right to expect creators of a derivative work to offer source code for the work. RMS wants Emacs, and by Emacs I mean the whole thing the FSF distributes in one tarball, to be free software with end users provided with source code for derivative works.

My problem with such a treatment of licenses is a free content provider; as an uploader of photographs to Commons, every time someone slaps the CC-BY-SA on their photo and then lets people use it as if it were public domain, it reduces the value of my CC-BY-SA on my photograph. If everyone is treating CC-BY-SA as being public domain, then I'm being unreasonable when I demand the works be treated as per the license. If one or two copyright owners of GPLed works get tetchy about distribution of their code against the licence, the rest of us are likely to be treated as unreasonable nuisances when complaining about license-infringing distribution; if many copyright holders so act, then normal (not pirates, not carefully conscientious) distributors will make an effort to follow the license.