100% agree that it does it what it does beautifully but it seems to me like there's little to no stewardship around it, and no one actively making sure that it can work with new types of content and provide a viable channel to professional publishers (in effect looking after both sides of the RSS "marketplace".)
Search engines are part of the puzzle for sure, but would love to see more transparent/open source recommender systems integrated with something like RSS to foster discovery without explicit queries.