No wonder the space program has stalled! Your friend's memory has failed him, usenet bears no resemblance to rss in anyway. Usenet was a discussion forum, rss is link syndication.
Except for the mailing list, RSS is the only relatively-heavily-used thing on the internet that shares Usenet's "openness" virtue: namely, there is no single "gatekeeper" organization that a reader must rely on to follow the authors in his RSS feed -- the sudden trouble that the OP experienced when upgrading to Mountain Lion is about the most disruptive thing that could happen to a reader's relationship with the authors in her RSS feed.
(If the assertion I was responding to had been that the designers of RSS should have tried harder to emulate Usenet's subtler virtues, I would have agreed.)