My point is that you seem to be very agitated by a process - getting and reading your RSS feeds - that Google Reader makes very easy and painless for me, with no updating or wrangling.

Lyds, it’s specifically NewsGator’s forced choice of conversion to Google Reader for synching that is giving me the shits—it’s both clunky and forcing me to send Google more user data if I want to keep using my favourite reader. Two issues, but I was focussing on the first one. You’re totally right that Goog’s reader is easy to use. I already use NetNewsWire so that’s less relevant for me. Their synching service, on the other hand, is far superior to NewsGator’s (as Brian pointed out, and you implied because Reader is so usable). The rest, as you say, is all about the Vegemite ;-)