I think historically, there were some bad man pages for GNU projects which just pointed to info, but I haven't seen that happen recently.
I'm not saying "don't even try to improve things", and I think that's a pretty un-generous read of my concern. I'm saying don't break people's expectations. Especially if those expectations might come into play in exigent circumstances, and create friction in a place where the user already has a problem that is far more important to them than whether they're using the output from most flexible documentation tool or not.
Like I said, it sounds like that's improved. If so, I'm glad. But I have specifically been burned, and my time that was wasted was also someone else's money. Given that, a bit of, "Hey, guys? Maybe think about how this choice might affect people?" is, IMO, warranted.
That's exactly what I have a problem with... there's a leap between "this sucks" to "therefore they must not care about how this affects other people" that is not justified. If you want something that fits your expectations of how Unix should work, we already have that, it's BSD and it's constructed with a lot of care not to break users' expectations of how Unix works.
The GNU project has really never had that as a project goal. The whole "GNU's Not Unix" acronym is not just a stab at copyrights, but it's a pretty good summary of their goal to create something which is not Unix but instead better than Unix. I'm not saying that they're doing it the right way, or that they actually are better, but that's their stated goal. Pretty much every GNU tool has some incompatibility with the equivalent Unix tool, and they don't care, because they're not trying to make a copy of Unix. Back in the day this was a problem because people would write shell scripts which would assume GNU userland. You still see it in a lot of packages which say that you have to use GNU Make, GNU Awk, GNU Sed, GNU Bison, etc. instead of the equivalent Unix program.
These pieces of advice have fallen by the wayside since GNU userspace has become the norm, but if you really want the Unix experience instead of the GNU experience, go use BSD.
(I've also just spent my entire workday cleaning up the consequences of someone else's think-o instead of working on my own tasks, some of which have a hard deadline. I'm probably kvetching more than anything. Apologies for the noise.)
I'll totally own that I'm reactive to that, but I really do think it's a little thoughtless, and a violation of the Principle of Least Surprise, to direct people elsewhere. I've been burned entirely too many times, trying to put out a fire, checking the man page to confirm I remember some argument or option correctly, and being told I'm looking in the wrong place. It's not that it's "morally wrong" to do that; it's that it introduces friction in a place where that might be — demonstrably has been, given my experience, which I know I'm not alone in having had — particularly painful.
Sometimes, "grepping through the man page" is, in fact, the quickest route to the info you need...