I'm trying to get a grip on your 'people writing code' vs. 'end user' distinction - since I'm both: I use other people's code, and I write my own (which I give away when I can). The reason that I still think that ESR is relevant both sides of the process is that the impact of Eric Raymond's work - making 'open source' acceptable to the corporate world - reflected back on the coding community in terms of added respect and power. 5 years ago 'free software' developers were, in my experience, very much backroom people working on 'infrastructure' projects whose value didn't come from the software itself, but rather supported some other value generating function (e.g. university network management software wasn't intended to be sold as software, but rather to support the 'core business' of the university).
When 'open source' software became a viable way of developing and releasing 'front room' software - i.e. software which fronts a compony and is intended not so much for in house users but for 'customers' - the social status and power of 'geeks' changed. ESR helped convince business to put money into developing such software - so even if his contribution in terms of lines of code, or coding practices, etc. has not been immense, his impact on the field has been significant.
To put it simply - if ESR has been useful as a marketing tool, don't you think that the success of this marketing has impacted on the 'open source' developers?
Peter -- Peter van Heusden <pvh at egenetics.com> NOTE: I do not speak for my employer, Electric Genetics "Criticism has torn up the imaginary flowers from the chain not so that man shall wear the unadorned, bleak chain but so that he will shake off the chain and pluck the living flower." - Karl Marx, 1844