Is it hindering innovation to that extent to justify the rewrite? Remember, GCC is the one of the most fundamental pieces of software running the entire OSS eco-system. It's internal beauty isn't so much important as it's utility to this system.

Apparently GCC is crimping Apple's style enough to justify a rewrite, although that may be due to licensing and lack of modularity more than ugly code.

Spoken like someone who's never tried to port GCC to a new CPU. It's seriously unfun.

Check out clang, it's looking pretty promising.

It's being done. It's called LLVM. Apple have been sponsoring it.