Where is the data that proves this? Leaving aside hipster trends (which I don't understand at all these days), what I see is that all the sites I visit, they have RSS/atom option; outside Bloomberg, which is a different story since they provides feeds via proprietary network.

What other tool gives me ability to follow dozens media sources, has offline capability and has dozens of implementations I can choose?

Leaving aside manager/sales talk, I believe they dumped Reader because they couldn't monetize it, just like Code Search.

It may be, but Reader was still a very popular product, as seen by the big fallout over the shutdown.

And not a very complicated product at that. Maintaining it really could not have taken a lot of staff.

I'm pretty sure they wanted to push users over to Google Plus.

I don't like Facebook, Reader was essentially my social network. All of my friends used it. I think they killed Reader to push users to Google Plus. If they had just built Reader into Google Plus I probably would have used it.

Conversely, killing off Reader could have been the reason RSS fell away.