If I were the authors of gcc

I say to myself, fake self, those zillions of flags work great, lets proliferate them except for one thing. I would issue a precedence table for the flags, including left right associations for filenames and operators with the '-' set. then point to the standard wiki shunting yard algorithm. Tell users that gcc runs the command line through shunt algorithm with that table, and that's it. I think you can get sudden agreement and the utility of gcc will go up, way up a bit I think. Configure processors can get a really big clue about specific languages, options and generate much better command lines, automatically. Cost? A hundred lines of code.