If you think you can do better you're welcome to do better. I say this without a hint of sarcasm. This is how open source works. It's a do–ocracy, not a democracy. Whoever makes a telnet server gets to decide how the telnet server works and how much testing it gets before release.
Maybe the lesson here is to stop letting the GNU folks do things, if this is what they do. This is only one example of craziness coming out of the GNU camp.