I tried to read that conversation in a neutral light, because I think RMS and JWZ are both kind of ... polarizing personalities, but RMS really came off as a stubborn, ineffective whiner in that whole thread. In particular "you hired away my maintainer" is a pathetic excuse for not releasing something for so long. Anybody could have hired away your maintainer, and you'd have to soldier on; it has no relevance that your maintainer went to a "competing" (in your territorial view) project.

I also read the argument about the redesign of the event system and was pretty flabbergasted. The argument seems to reduce to "lucid emacs decided to design a proper event datatype because having an event be entirely represented by a simple integer keycode both lost information and made it impossible to represent certain keystrokes" versus "but ints are simple and backward compatible!"