@moonman It is horrible, I agree. There's a reason I don't say I'm a !GNUsocial developer, but rather just a maintainer. I want nothing more than to see the codebase get rewritten from scratch in a sensible language.
Unfortunately, given the great body of work that the codebase is, rewriting and including all functionality that comes along with it takes a long, long time. #Mastodon's been at it for about a year now and still doesn't have, afaik: #FOAF, groups, various small helpful markup/header treats.
But they're getting there I guess. Unfortunately I'm allergic to Ruby.