The technology behind Google+ seems nice tho ( so was Wave ), very snappy but that is probably because of lack of users. I like some of the communities there, but it seems to die slowly.
At the same time, a lot of people never gave G+ a chance, because they felt Google already had too much power. It felt like giving Google the "missing link". At least, that is my experience.
Agreed. I really wish Google would make all G+ feeds into RSS feeds, and add the ability to subscribe to any RSS feeds in the G+ stream/circles. This would effectively make G+ into an RSS feed reader, with the ability to very simply publish one's own feed. I'm sure not many would switch to using G+ as a feed reader in the near-term after they shut down Google Reader, but it would be a small first step to begin tearing down the giant walls around social networks.
During those years, they let Reader languish, it was treated as a dead project, then finally shut down. So it felt like a continuous series of events.
So the narrative of at minimum neglecting Google Reader in favor of the not a substitute of Google+ would seem to be correct.
And yeah, at the time there was discussion about how they should have kept reader and somehow rolled it and its users into G+. Reader was their only organically successful social sharing product.
That is how I felt. Once Google started doing things like trying to force people to link their YouTube and Gmail accounts I got off the bandwagon (I now not only don't login to YouTube I block YouTube from setting cookies altogether).