This whole notion of RSS' "brand" being the problem just reeks of a used car salesman trying to convince me that spare tires are for chumps.
The world is littered with highly useful technologies that nobody adopts, or eventually die to less useful, arguably objectively worse technologies. Adoption and software life cycles are not a techo-meritocracy.
In short - you are completely and totally ignoring the social aspects of software adoption and use. But they are, in fact, often the most important part. I don't actually particularly like this any more than any other software engineer - it often feels wrong. That does not (and will not) make it any less of a reality.
(as an aside, yes, in fact, as joist hangers and ties and such became more and more required due to code or construction method, structural screws became all the rage - nailing joist hangers/etc with regular framing nail guns was hard and dangerous, but structural screws just require an impact driver or a screw gun to do safely. Now they actually have specialized metal connector nailers, so structural screws are getting ignored again outside of decks)
Usefulness isn't a high enough bar. When choosing a technology, I might also want an active community, for support, for ecosystem tooling and integration, and more.
Things with a reputation of being dead gains lower interest and support.