> the single substantial point which still remains
If you mean the fact that in his LKML post (but not in the GCC bug tracker) Linus attributed the bug to "incompetence/ willful ignorance/ etc" instead of assuming that it just snuck in (I'm not sure I agree with that interpretation, but I'll adopt it here for the sake of discussion), for a bug that's severe enough to make Linus prohibit kernel compiles using the affected version of gcc, I'm not sure what the difference is, practically speaking. Either way, the compiler can't be used with the bug present, so, substantively, it doesn't matter whether the bug just snuck in or the GCC developers wilfully ignored the behavior; that version of gcc can't be used to compile the kernel until the bug is fixed.
As you so aptly pointed out, the GCC maintainers are no fools but rather mature, competent professionals. I think the explanation that it was a simple oversight is far more likely than malice or incompetence.
Indeed. And the same applies to Linus.
> the single substantial point which still remains
If you mean the fact that in his LKML post (but not in the GCC bug tracker) Linus attributed the bug to "incompetence/ willful ignorance/ etc" instead of assuming that it just snuck in (I'm not sure I agree with that interpretation, but I'll adopt it here for the sake of discussion), for a bug that's severe enough to make Linus prohibit kernel compiles using the affected version of gcc, I'm not sure what the difference is, practically speaking. Either way, the compiler can't be used with the bug present, so, substantively, it doesn't matter whether the bug just snuck in or the GCC developers wilfully ignored the behavior; that version of gcc can't be used to compile the kernel until the bug is fixed.