The craziest thing I see though is people importing the Atom namespace into RSS feeds to get some of the elements. At that point, I can't fathom what advantages there is to the producer to not just produce an Atom feed.

RSS 1.0 was basically the first attempt to produce something like Atom without reinventing too much, but Dave threw his toys out of the pram, so the only option was to reinvent it with a different name and clean up the remaining sharp corners.

It's tragically funny. Atom is both more correct and easier to produce and parse than any RSS variant.

Were I to join Automattic in the morning, the first thing I'd try is to attempt to get them to abandon their weird RSS mashup as their default feed format. There's no good reason why Wordpress still generates RSS feeds.

Yes, I'm a bit bitter, but I was in the feed wars, and it still stings.