[shadowofneptune]

The big thing seems to be less about GCC, and more a question of, "what should a compiler be?"

He'd be better looking at smaller, less-known compilers, like the Portable C Compiler or the Intel C Compiler. If you want hyper-optimized, better-than-assembly quality, you pretty much have to give up predictability. The best optimizations that are predictable can't be written using modern compiler theory. They instead involve a lot of work, care, and attention that can't be generalized to other architectures. It can require a love for an architecture, even if's a crap one.

It's a tradeoff. Not every compiler needs to be optimized, and not every compiler needs to embody the spirit of a language.