I don't think you can have one without the other. GNU was successful in large part because of RMS's uncompromising position on issues both big and small. RMS is not, and never was, a "power-hungry dick". He just has strong and well-defined political views, and the GNU project was created to reflect those views.
Unfortunately, at times I look at GNU and see that it's a project whose success is in spite of RMS. He gave a good basis in the original manifest, gave generally good inspiration, but that's what it is - inspiration. Said inspiration made people work on the projects that over time somehow managed to end up under GNU umbrella. But a lot of RMS-managed, top-down GNU projects? Never got anywhere.
See also the discussion mentioned by Ulrich Drepper back in 2001, regarding RMS' behaviour back when Ulrich started to port glibc to linux.
