This is a great piece, stop everything and read it now. I just have a couple of comments. 

The reason to fork an open source browser and make it sing RSS like Pavarotti sang Carmen, or Jimi Hendrix sang Watchtower, is to show the browser guys how to do it. Give them something to clone. Work out the issues on the side, with users who really care, and publishers who really care. And then present it as a gift to Mozilla and Google. 

One more thing, I don't get the idea that publishers want to kill RSS, rather it's the tech industry that does. It's something the users own, they can't trap people inside it because it started in such a way that that's not possible. But they never stop trying.