People sometimes overlook the fact that the FSF is clearly a political organization, the GNU project places politics over technology, and Stallman himself is a political activist first and foremost. Yet people forget this and treat GNU stuff like technology-driven projects.

Personally, I'm much more comfortable with the approach Linus Torvalds takes, where writing good, functional software takes precedence over purity concerns, and where technical limitations would not be introduced with the purpose of complicating interactions with proprietary software.