I should add to myself (sorry for the self-reply): I hope I'm also not feeding the trolls. I mean, seriously, 10 klocs is too much? On second reflection, that has a mild troll odor to it. At least as far as I nose.
Yeah, you were probably feeding the troll. Allow me to entertain in the style of Nina Totenberg.
Question: what editor do you think the emacs maintainers use?
Answer: they eat their own dog food.
Question: and how many lines of code is emacs?
Answer: over one million lines (of lisp!)
Question: is RMS insane?
Answer: possibly, but emacs is still a nice editor (even if you don't use it and you hate it, you have to acknowledge that a lot of people do use it and like it).
Question: what about the linux kernel?
Answer: well, it's gargantuan...
Question: okay, how big was it in 1995 [when linus was still doing a lot of work himself]
Answer: still pretty large, at least hundreds of thousands of lines
Question: what fancy IDEs existed back then?
Answer: let's see, 1) vi + make 2) emacs + make ... 3) ... I can't think of a third that ran under linux