I feel like the problem with RSS was mainly a branding issue. First of all... acronyms don't sell. No non-expert user is ever going to click an orange icon with a wi-fi logo that says "RSS" or "XML". MAYBE they'd click a button that says "Subscribe". Individual browsers and implementations tried to brand them as "Live Bookmarks" or similar, but there wasn't much unity around it.

RSS is of course unbelievably useful, and people who understood that the content of a site was being published side by side in a human readable but totally nonstandard format (HTML) and a machine readable and much more standard format (RSS,ATOM,etc.) instantly grabbed some kind of reader and subscribed to anything they were interested in.

I tried to preach the gospel of feeds. I tried to get people to subscribe to MY blogs. Even most of my medium-technical friends said, "Yeah, that whole reader thing sounds cool, I've been meaning to set that up." Non-technical people simply subscribed to things via email.

If somehow email could have organized itself more naturally into push (email) and pull (feeds) buckets, then it could have perhaps happened naturally, but confusing standards, implementations, and no real great way to explain the benefits to new users is what killed RSS (and XML feeds in general)... there was no war.