I don't think PR is the real issue. IMHO, the fundamental principle behind FSF philosophy is the license is primarily written to secure the long-term interest of the _user_, not the community of the authors. The reason authors were okay with that in the first place is, early on in computing, users and authors largely overlapped, if not exactly the same. Over time, the authors and users diverged widely, thus their interests diverged. FSF philosophy has failed to appeal to the authors of the software because it is economically a bad deal for them. Users who do not pay are by-and-large leeches. Also, some of the freedoms are not considered as valuable by the users as they are for fellow authors, perhaps sensibly so because they are never going to utilize such freedoms.

That's of course an element, but there can be more than one problem at once. That the FSF holds position that's economically tricky makes it harder to "sell" it, which only reinforces the need for better communication.

Plus, the GPL has long been used for commercial purposes as well.

The FSF has had actual professionals running communications.

I don't think the issue is in the form but in the content: developers don't want to hear they are favoring greedy private interests (sometimes including themselves, sometimes at their expense) instead of the common goods, because the freedom to restrict a good from everyone for personal profit is more important than the freedom to access said good and build upon it.

Its not about communication. They are fighting against very strong incentives for devs to do the "wrong" thing