This is the sanest answer. No amount of leadership is going to help an incompetent team. A codebase with massive technical debt, tight coupling, and accidental complexity will be hard to improve incrementally. Impossible without competent engineers.
I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as Free Software is actually GNU/Free Software. GNU/Free Software is not an ecosystem unto itself, but rather one component of a fully functioning GNU ecosystem.