I was indeed a Reader user, but by no means a power-user, so I could very well be unaware of some difficult-to-duplicate parts of Reader that are hidden under the covers. Can you let me know what I could be missing?
Google caches the entire history of an RSS feed from the moment it entered their database. This is in many cases unique, irreplaceable data that's going to have to be systematically extracted over the next few months, because I seriously doubt Google will release the entire data dump.
In your estimate, what percentage of Reader users have, or will, donate to the Internet Archive to perform this archival task?
At what percentage level would it be wrong to call Reader users "entitled", given that the IA folks were hurting for disk space while these complainers chose to ignore its pleas?
Not everyone who complains knows about IA or should necessarily care about it. We are not all the same person with same needs and things we miss from reader may not be the same, but that doesn't mean that it isn't a true loss/problem for each that is not easy to replace (I tried and none of the alternatives come close which is why I WILL write my own).
Sure I could build my own (in fact, I plan to), but this is obviously completely non-realistic attitude to take for every service that can or does bugger you.
Much easier than building these new alternatives is for you to just not read the articles which bother you. Especially since in this case you mostly can know from the title if they will.