It goes beyond just battles on mole hills: the FSF and the GNU mailing lists are full of extremely time-consuming discussions that are fueled by conspiratorial thinking, feature excessive celebration of nitpicking, with participants that regularly lose themselves in groan-worthy tangents, operate on oversimplified models of society with unjustified arrogance, etc --- they are really bad places for constructive discourse.

There are not many people who are both talented in their fields and have the surplus time and energy to exercise a saint-like restraint to deal with all the draining crap. This environment is the sediment that filters a lot of talent and successfully prevents healthy growth.

This does not necessarily apply to individual GNU packages, but the overarching "project" structure is rotten and resistant to any attempts at reform.