I love Google Reader as well, but switched quite seamlessly to Feedly. What's your problem with Feedly? I assume it's something about the aesthetic design of it, because it's very much the same as Google Reader.
Did they change things? Because when the great reader explosion happened after Google Reader died I evaluated tons of readers and decided on a newsblur.com subscription in the end. I remember Feedly catering to the "images are great"-Pinterest crowd.
Yeah. I suggest giving them another try. I actually thought they were the most popular RSS reader these days. It's very customizable (even for the free tier).
It looks better than then, true. But it's still trying to be so flashy. And I feel like they are trying to push all their useless social features on me. And there's a lack of customizability. I guess the free tier is better than what newsblur offers, but for me, newsblur is where I'm staying.