The software distribution I was asking the parent poster about is MSYS2 (http://msys2.github.io/ and http://sourceforge.net/projects/msys2/), do please come back with constructive criticism on that project if you are interested enough to investigate further.
You're correct, my complaints were towards mingw.org, not MSYS2. My apologies for not reading carefully enough. I may actually take a look, thanks for directing me.