He must be using a different RSS than me, because RSS for me is another endless feed.

If the answer is "you're not curating the list of people you follow well enough", then I don't see how RSS is different than any other network. Re: Twitter, is very common to hear people say "You have to curate your feed!", or "You have to use lists!". RSS is the same, if you subscribe to a handful of personal pages, then RSS will be nice. If you use RSS to subscribe to magazines, you're going to get a big list of articles. The same applies to FB or Twitter.