I didn't follow the original discussion, but while I agree with the importance of the "open web" and the relative evilness of "corporate blogging silos", I don't quite understand how RSS and HTML are "really different faces of the same thing".

RSS is an open way of discovering new content; it is dead(-ish) because real people don't use it.

I'm aware that there are RSS readers; there even are RSS readers that actually work.

But RSS readers are not what the great majority of people use to discover new content; new content is discovered "socially" on YC or Reddit, etc.