I'm also the creator of Datastreamer (http://www.datastreamer.io/) which you could think of as a massive petabyte-scale RSS aggregator.
Seeing that I helped invent RSS, and have probably parsed more RSS than anyone (hundreds of petabytes), I'm going to call it and say that RSS is dead.
Datastreamer used to index RSS and we've long since deprecated it as a secondary data source. It's really not our primary content source.
We prefer to index raw HTML.
HTML can do exactly what you want and you don't need RSS thanks to microformats and microdata.
Here's the main problem:
1. Publishers don't care about your use case. They WANT you go to back to the site and click their ads.
2. Publishers want to hoard their content and sell it if possible. This is the exact antithesis of RSS content distribution (that the Internet should be open).
What's the way forward?
1. HTML microdata parsing RSS but implemented in microdata.
Publishers actually WANT their data to be distributed this way as they're hoping their content is distributed over Twitter and Facebook.
The only downside here is that full content is often not used.
2. Metadata sharing.
SELF metadata sharing where communities of users markup and share their own content.
I'm going to be working on some ideas around this in Polar (my project around distributed content sharing).
I think you're going to start seeing some of the ideas around the next gen of content syndication in a few months.
Right now I'm trying to build a large network of users by building an amazing tool to handle your content.
Once the user base is there then I can enable content collaboration where users are sharing content to each other.
This will also include some RSS-like features at some point but indexed around microdata.