As I've written in some other comments, because of my lack of foresight I wasn't clear enough.

I've put this in other comments but, briefly, it's not the protocol RSS that has a problem. It's the RSS-enabled future that we imagined back in the early 00's that didn't happen. Those opportunities for connecting things together via content (esp. around the RSS micro-formats work that was going on) disappeared when content got swallowed by advserisers.