> Being in charge of your own feed does not mean it will remain lean and sweet.

You're right. It does not automatically mean it. You have to maintain it just like anything else in life.

> is mostly just a fantasy.

It's a fantasy I live in daily.

> What happens in reality is that you more or less quickly ammass a big list of blogs and sources that gets updated by the hour

I guess this mostly depends on what kind of things you subscribe to. 95% of my sources are personal blogs of software developers or artists and most of them blog weekly or more rarely.

I couldn't handle a feed where sources update multiple times a day, it would just become a pain.