That's what I'd heard at first, but I remember being corrected and told that it was much friendlier than the public assumed, and it was basically treated as gcc

That's what I'd heard at first, but I remember being corrected and told that it was much friendlier than the public assumed, and it was basically treated as gcc's unstable branch. Also, remember that egcs started out as a merger of several devs' individual experimental forks containing stuff like new frontends, new architectures, and optimizations for specific processors. The projects that went into egcs were all pre-existing projects; egcs was just a consolidation.