Apple removed rss from Mail because it was pretty crappy. Anyone interested in RSS should hit the appstore and snag one of many RSS readers that blows Apple's offering off the planet. When I discovered Reeder I knew my browsing habits would change forever, it's that much better.
Yes, but this misses the point: An OS upgrade hosed her data. Only the fact that she is (apparently) a small minority prevents this from being a big deal, a fact which itself sort of concerns me.
Not exactly. They removed the feature but left the data behind. I assume they did this on purpose so it could be salvaged by the user if needed. I suspect Apple Support could have helped or perhaps third party RSS readers could look for the data and automatically import it. The only thing they could have done differently is to maybe do a runounce in Mail that tells the user RSS is gone, point them to a support KB article, and maybe point the user to the Mac App Store to search for RSS readers.
It was crappy for reading articles, but I had a few message feeds ("hey folks, everyone who wants to be notified about events x on server y subscribe here") which was really handy to have in his message inbox.
