Part of the problem is that RMS is an all or nothing proposition. Look at some of the major things he rails at, like closed source and DRM. He's got lots of company (and it's near universal when it comes to DRM), but if you don't buy into his "copyleft is more important than software quality or uptake in the real world" approach, you're not just wrong, you're evil. GCC, one of the two biggest crown jewels of the GNU project, is in dire straits and being replaced by the non-copyleft LLVM, not so much because of the different licenses, but because of his totally inflexible ideological stewardship that is not allowing GCC to do some things that are now expected of compilers but that would make it easier for Software Horders to use GCC in ways anathema to him. (As a steward of software development projects, he's really, really, REALLY bad, large parts of which are due to those "bad habits" discussed below.)

Your eldest son may be a risk taker, but does that go so far as (truly futilely) hitting on a gangster's moll while eating with a group of innocents who didn't sign up for that level of danger when they went for a normally routine run to the favorite late night Cantonese restaurant?

As for his "intractable" "bad habits", they were set in stone long before GNU/FSF, and as for respect ... hmmm, I don't know, he's weird about that. But not very flexible (I'm not the best person judge all that, seeing as how you grant me a degree of respect or else, and he did that).