30 years ago the FSF was the dominant organization in an obscure open source movement, today they are a footnote in the history of an successful open source movement that have gone completely mainstream.
This process have left FSF without the resources to do anything but create drama inside the open source movement and predictably they have become the PETA of OpenSource concerned more with proving their own purity and commitment then anything else.
I'd say they prove their purity because that's what distinguishes them from the rest. Now, if you talk in terms of projects successfully backed/run by the FSF, you may be right, there are not as popular as they were.
But as guardians of the GPL ethos/politics, I'd say they do a good job (considering that this ethos hardly translates to money)
