GCC dates from an era when, to do cool programming, you had to work on compilers or operating systems. Those are hard. The people who might have worked on GCC in the past are now out writing "apps", hoping to get rich.
@Animats, this is very true. Many only want to use languages which are considered easy. Ruby and Swift are examples of the easier languages which allow developers to avoid issues like memory allocation bugs. I do find that the side effect of using simple languages, relying heavily on frameworks and easy to use dependencies leads to complex applications which the developer does not really understand. The extreme example is a WordPress site which is slow or buggy and the "developer" who put it together does not know why much less appreciate what is going on in the MySQL database. I wonder how many developers are even capable of doing this low level work in relation to the total number of people who call themselves developers.