I share this sentiment towards RSS readers to some extent. I've done a similar signup-giveup dance with Google Reader several times. It is all the work it adds to my day that I dislike. I've tried desktop RSS readers too, with the same result. It gets harder to go back after a while too - I can almost feel the stress increase when I am trying to use an RSS reader again.
I've often felt that something like the "River of News"[1] notion that Dave Winer likes to talk about would work really well, I wonder if there are any public services that behave in that manner.
The basic idea is:
1) No read/unread counts. 2) No bold-ing/un-bolding of stuff I have or have not read. 3) No emphasis on grouping by site - should work out of the box as a single stream of posts to any of the sites I am interested in. 4) Subscribe via single-click bookmarklet, ala Instapaper's Read Later bookmarklet.