GNU's success speaks for itself.
UNIX was developed by computer scientists with formal education in computing theory and algorithms, on top of those people inventing some of the algorithms and data structures which are still taught in formal computer science today, and for a good reason. Then the work was taken up by engineers with formal education in the same. But how is that conflating an operating environment (not even an operating system, but an operating environment) with computer science? What the hell...
The success of GNU is built on ignorance -- then-teenagers fresh out of high school downloading ISO's on their P.C. buckets because they didn't even know there is such a thing as a UNIX workstation, or thinking they couldn't afford one (which wasn't true, as older systems could be had for a bargain). They could have just as easily downloaded NetBSD or FreeBSD but didn't because they didn't know any better. Even today the entire hype is based on not knowing any better (why are we still running Linux, eh?) That's not something to be proud of, but I suppose it does "speak for itself" in a way.
GNU is not Unix, as the name so clearly articulates, so other than your seeming complaint that 'real' computer scientists always write Unix-style utilities, I'm not sure how your criticism of GNU tools doing more than one thing is at all relevant.
FreeBSD was released in 1993, and NetBSD in the same year. BSD as a whole only went from a proprietary distribtuion to open source in that year. GNU was started in 1983, thus making even that criticism of GNU completely unfounded.
Redhat, SUSE, and IBM... bash them all you want, are not high school side projects.