The person who pushed RSS to success (IMO) Dave Winer was superb at communicating and evangelizing his goals, connecting partners like Netscape and NYT, and documenting his work including the RSS related tools he built.
His spec was “worse” in the sense that it was under specified but better in the sense that it achieved wide support (both in text and podcast form) among people who made content. This is partly because Dave had first an influential email newsletter and Wired column (DaveNet) and second an influential very early blog Scripting News. He had also been working with news companies for years at prior startups. He could write well. He showed up for and arranged meetings with people who did not at first understand the need for something like rss. He was clear and relentless in his promotion which was borne out of what seemed to be a genuine desire for open standards in this area rather than greed / trying to do lock in.
People with technical backgrounds in places like this tend to fixate on the technical aspects of Atom vs RSS. There is no question Atom is more technically correct. There is also no question (IMO) it came too late and focused on the wrong things — being correct and complete at the expense of being complicated and hard to understand — and more importantly was led and promoted by people who lacked the social skills to make it popular outside of technical circles. (These folks could be brutal about rss's flaws without seeming to have awareness of this shortcoming in their own effort.)