I cannot speak for all of those folks, but I can speak for myself. I am a FESCo member elected by the community. Despite being a Red Hat employee allowed to dedicate a certain amount of my working time to FESCo things, being on FESCo is not my job and I am not in FESCo to represent Red Hat. Nobody from Red Hat management has ever asked me to vote in a particular way and if they did I’d told them to stop. Only once I received an email from a higher-up about a FESCo/modularity matter which could be considered a bit persuasive but I decided to act in the community’s best interest anyway.
For example, if I see that this change proposal is a no-go for our community (as it seems), I will vote -1 for this proposal. There is no evil Red Hat/IBM person hovering over me making me approve this. (Or at least there hasn’t been one before I sent this.)
(Off-topic: I don’t think this forum is going to solve the “long threads on devel” problem, it’s already quite hard to follow the various discussions here.)