I'm curious, which products are you referring to? In most cases the GNU version predates the alternative by a large margin. E.g. screen vs tmux, squid vs varnish, wget vs curl, net-tools vs iproute2 etc.

Of more recent software "clones", there is guix vs nix, mcron vs vixie-cron, shepherd vs systemd, gnutls vs openssl, all high-quality implementations of good ideas.

Sure, lsh has a way to go before it's a viable alternative to OpenSSH, but I wouldn't say it's low-quality. I don't think I've come across a GNU project which felt "half-put-together", rather the opposite.

The GNU projects' motivation is very clear-cut and not at all different from e.g. the BSD camp or suckless. How are they questionable?