Zionism, the Haggadah and MO Hypocrisy

David and I are working our way through the Haggadah. While I was helping him translate Ha Lachman Anya we got up to le-shanah ha-ba'ah be-ar'a de-yisra'el. He asked me if this is a lie. I mumbled something about how we hope next year it will be different and pushed him along to the next sentence.

The truth is that for the past few years I've skipped that line during the Seder.
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I treated myself to a brand new Shulchan Aruch set at the YU Seforim Sale. It is the medium sized Bahir edition. My wife thinks it should be illegal to sell books with such small print, but I'm not a heavy user and I do think the cripsness of the print overcomes the small size.

I was so excited when I opened up the box tonight and I figured I'd show it to David. We learned together the siman about the afikomen and I introduced him to navigating around the page. At one point he had a question that I couldn't answer and he suggested we check what Rashi says. I explained that even though some of the nosei kelim are printed in Rashi type, Rashi himself lived much earlier. He asked me to tell him about the authors of the glosses. (He is always particularly interested in who Sephardi and Ashkenazi.) The truth is I can't really identify most the personalities behind the glosses, so I gravitated to the Gra. I started telling him about Gaon Rabbeinu Eliyahu and his eyes opened wide. "He has the same last name as Moshe," he excitedly said. "Are they related?"

He also wanted to know if the Rama was upset that his own projected work was pre-empted by the Beis Yosef, and on the other hand if the mechaber was angry that the Rama had added his notes to the Shulchan Aruch. It's funny, but I never really thought about it. They were contemporaries, but was there any direct interaction between the two?