Thanks again, to Stephen Downes, who points to a Guardian article on the future where this passage confirms what I was talking about in the last post:

The open web created by idealist geeks, hippies and academics, who believed in the free and generative flow of knowledge, is being overrun by a web that is safer, more controlled and commercial, created by problem-solving pragmatists.

These are the pragmatists who would be happy to see RSS die before the casual web user becomes aware enough to see its worth. (Another link from Stephen's Daily Newsletter.)