I have been following this discussion for quite a while now, guess it's the right time to introduce myself as one of the newcomers.
I had attended the Abstractions in GCC workshop 2012 by Prof. Uday and his team. It definitely helped me kick start with understanding of GCC and got me interested; so much so that I chose GCC as the framework to implement a global analysis algorithm as my final year project (I am a CSE Undergraduate student in India). Up to now, I have tried to make my foundations strong by learning essential theory by taking courses in Compiler Construction & Compiler Design involving study of optimization techniques and other basics. In the next 2-3 months I plan to study the source code more rigorously and implement the analysis algorithm. I certainly agree about lack of direction and documentation, I found even the Internals document incomplete at many points in satisfying my curiosity about certain questions related to GCC. Good to see there is an effort to change the state of affairs. I would like to volunteer for any kind of contribution I can make in this effort, and I think, as a newcomer, I will have a slightly different perspective of things that might help in solving this problem. Thanks -- Kartik http://k4rtik.wordpress.com/
