Compiler vendors are people, and in fact, if you don't like that set of people, there are plenty of vendors who have forks :)
IE if you don't like gcc 4.8's treatment of behavior, it's not like there aren't 50 different arm forks from different vendors you can use, with or without their SOC's.
Yet none of these vendors have apparently heard enough from customers that they have made what are pretty simple patches.
It's really, really hard to sell someone on a non-standard implementation of a popular language like C. For example, I've had customers beg me to add an extension to C. I implement it, and present it to them. They refuse to use it - because then their code would be dependent on a non-Standard feature.
The solution (for me, anyway) was to create an entirely new language. The changes that nobody wanted in C (not because they were bad, but because they were non-Standard) found plenty of traction and users in D.
This is a very good observation. The exception is strict subsets though; there are plenty of people using MISRA, and that's an extremely restrictive subset of C. Similarly this would be a dialect of C that is identical in behavior for conforming C programs, rather than C with some extensions.
Compiler vendors are people, and in fact, if you don't like that set of people, there are plenty of vendors who have forks :)
IE if you don't like gcc 4.8's treatment of behavior, it's not like there aren't 50 different arm forks from different vendors you can use, with or without their SOC's.
Yet none of these vendors have apparently heard enough from customers that they have made what are pretty simple patches.