Before I say anything else, your viewpoint is totally valid. :) I can't truly argue against it in an objective sense, I think.

It's funny that you say that, however, because that's my perspective on XML in general; it's a solution looking for a problem. Sure, we have Atom, it's here, let's just use it, and I kind of agree. Yet if Atom has already been in a sort of decline, if you will, the complexity it adds only detracts from any sort of resurgence in adoption. The entire syntax is designed to support types, which as far as I've seen is something that has never really been used. I mean, whose feed actually uses custom XML namespaces/tags? Feeds are these verbose and overly-abstract markup files for a purpose nobody really asked for. If someone needs to stick more metadata into their feed, they can already do it with JSON by just adding a non-standard key to the object. Done. No need to have anything beyond primitive types or declaring namespaces.

As far as the HTML thing goes, that's a fair point, but I have to disagree. I don't want HTML to taint titles of things in a feed reader. It's bad enough that people can use emojis and different stylized unicode characters in them, but HTML would just make things worse. I don't need titles to have bold or italics or colors or whatnot. If that's going to be in the actual content body, then so be it, but what you are suggesting sounds like a horrible idea. Granted, I didn't have that problem back when I used to use a feed reader.

Where did this come from? You refer to an atom feed as RSS, someone decides to add RSS to their site, and they implement atom because that's how you do RSS. What's the problem?