RSS isn't for hackers, it's for infovores. The same people who make the majority of pageviews on the internet, oh and also make most of the pages on the web. It's for a minority, but that minority is the very tip-top of the most hardcore users of the web. It's not going away.

I'd say that the movement from print news to digital news and per-author and per-article consumption and the resulting "curation" craze means RSS is more relevant now, not less.

It's just that companies like Facebook and Google are trying to lock in users on their own platforms.

Makes you wonder what is ahead for Blogger. It will probably be assimilated eventually.

That's like saying HTML is for hackers: ordinary users shouldn't need to look at the raw serialization format if the service is any good. The many not hackers I interacted with on the old reader appreciated the way they could keep track of interesting things even if they were only shallowly aware of how it worked.

Exactly. Here on HN we can see people complaining about Chrome being bloated, slow and that they're considering moving back to Firefox as result.

Since only a minority of Chrome users are RSS users, it makes sense to have it as an extension. They're not stopping anyone from building one. So, hack away.