>The idea that if you want to promote software freedom you need to make tools and systems that ordinary people can modify - preferably without learning Emacs - doesn't seem to have occurred to him. It seems that in Stallman's world the public are supposed to become MIT-grade hackers before they can earn their freedom.

No, because freedom of modification and the guarantee that such modifications must also be released with a similar licence means everybody, programmers and non-programmers, benefit from that freedom, directly because they modified the source code, or indirectly because they can freely use that modified software, respectively.