You are probably right, but it is depressing how techies don't see the big picture & don't want to provide an on-ramp to the RSS/Atom world for newcomers.
We still use RSS and Atom feeds for podcasts. It's a pretty widely-adopted use case. Perhaps there is a lot more to the contraction of RSS as a way for discovering publishing of "blog"-style media than "Reader got killed" (it seems like Reader offered more features than just RSS consolidation that someone could, hypothetically, build... But nobody has yet?).
2. Everyone who doesn't use a static site generate only has to add the XSLT file and add a single line to the XML. No need to write any code: new code is not a big deal for many HN readers, but not every blog author is a coder.