True, it is sad. What I don't understand is why Google didn't continue to push for RSS like they used to in ye olden times with Reader.
High quality blogs both produce content and link to other high quality content - both things that Google should be interested in to improve search. Instead they decided to capture that information (and eyeballs) with Google+, a calculated gamble that they lost.
If I was king of Google, I would be trying to foster a strong, open blogging community as a backstop against the Facebook's of the world swallowing content inside their non-indexable event horizons.