"I don't mean everyone who uses a piece of software should have to know the code intimately; merely that they should have the freedom to see it, modify it and learn from it, should the need or desire arise."
Hopefully, in your ideal world, this doesn't take away the freedoms of the developers that don't want to release their code.
"You're mostly too young to remember the world in which code was closed, by default, and you had to learn without the benefit of an infinite variety of examples to peruse"
This would have happened even without the GNU license. Anything that can be digital is being shared on the Internet, regardless of the license.
"and so that the gap between the technology haves and have nots does not grow further and faster."
This doesn't really make any sense. Most people will never look at the source code...so the absence of a license that gives you the right to tinker with the inner workings of an application won't really have an effect on the "technology haves and have nots". We should be more concerned with people that can't eat.
"Note that I'm not discussing licenses here, but the general culture of software. If we have a culture of sharing, which RMS and the FSF has been instrumental in creating (and the GPL was merely a part of that), we have a culture in which young programmers can learn from the experienced, and a culture in which barriers to entry are not as economic in nature."
Which is funny because this right here is devaluing programmers' salaries every day. Because there are so many free apps out there, companies can hire less experienced developers for less pay (IE: mechanics instead of engineers). It's one of those things that nobody will notice until it's too late. I suspect at this point, we will start to see programmer unions to keep wages at an inflated level. So, when your company decides to replace you with someone cheaper or goes over to India or the Philippines, don't complain.
I also don't think the word "free" should be used to describe GNU software. It implies free, as in price. It also implies that you can do what you want with it. If a corporation decides to change the code around, redistribute, and close-source it, they will get sued. This doesn't sound very free to me.
Even if they closed-sourced the application, the original source code is still free. You just don't get the changes (which were never yours in the first place).