> it would look better to be associated with the designers behind a successful
> ISA (68K), instead of one that in my opinion was a misstep by Motorola (88K).

Exactly. Btw, according to that PDF (page 12), Alsup joined Motorola only in 1981 (give or take one year), so for that reason alone he couldn't possibly have co-designed the 1979-released 68000.

> their probable real legacy is a design that drove Motorola to IBM's door.

They never claimed their design to be based on the 68k, so it's not based on the 88k either just because a designer of the 88k architecture helped them with their project. Alsup also is a designer of the 2nd generation hyperSPARC and the chief architect of the AMD K9, yet Libre-SOC is obviously not based on any of them just because of that.

> why they mention the CDC 6600 is anyone's guess, since that's so old
> that it isn't likely that anything related to it is terribly relevant.

Libre-SOC's dynamic pipeline scheduling is based on the CDC 6600's scoreboarding algorithm. And that's precisely where Alsup has helped the project:

https://libre-soc.org/3d_gpu/architecture/6600scoreboard/

> laying claim to 68K and 6600 heritage

I can't see where they claim 68k heritage. And the CDC 6600 heritage is real, as far as I can see.