I do the same. I do it because I subscribe to sites other than HN, and by subscribing to the HN feed I can get the articles from HN as well as the other sites I subscribe to all in the same place, ie my feed reader (also using Feedly). Nothing overly original here as I assume personal content aggregation was one of the original intentions of RSS.

No if I want that, I’ll explore the sites for it.

I prefer to consume HN via my feed reader. I feel like I receive most or all of the original topics/posta without regard to algorithm ranking. So I will see flagged and dead posts and can make my own determination on the topic without a bunch of HN folks determining what I will see. Of course by then commenting is disabled, but that’s fine.