Stallman's and FSF's main contribution, in my opinion anyway, is the development tooling ( gcc, gdb, bunutils, make system etc; but definitely not emacs
) that allowed so much else ( open and closed source ) to flourish.
Even the GPL, with its restrictive covenants, is fine as one of number of choices as to how you want your freely given code contribution to be used by others.
Where RMS and the FSF adherents become anathema to me is when they choose to present their opinions and preferences as in being morally superior because they are unequivocally in the interests of software users.
Unfortunately, this is simply not true; rather, it is in the self-interest of RMS and small group of like-minded coders who revel in their ability to manipulate software, and are somewhat outraged by the notion that everyone else who writes software is not obliged to make this easy for them.
For the vast majority of the global population ( well in excess of 99% ), the ability to access source code is of zero value, because they can do nothing with it, and would not want to anyway. It may not even occur to RMS that the vast majority of software users don't care about source "freedom", simply because it is so important to his worldview and sense of self.
As you point out, the distribution naming fandango is just ridiculous. An operating system always was, and always will be defined by the kernel architecture, not by the programs that are written for it. Most Linux distributions have a wide variety of user-space programs to choose from, including ( but not limited to ) the user-space GNU programs and utilities. But equally, in most Linux distributions, you can happily delete every program that is sourced from the GNU project, and surprisingly you still have a working Linux operating system.
If the FSF had put half as much effort into the GNU operating system as they do into claiming kudos for everything, then they might have actually finished it and moved on to developing further useful software. As it is, they look like they may even lose their pre-eminence in tooling to LLVM.
