"THERE were my RSS feeds! They weren’t deleted at all, just left in an unusable, unreadable format no app could use." - this is the most important part I think. Many software vendors - and Apple is definitely one of the most prominent in this regard - think that if they need to store user data, it's completely OK to store it in undocumented non-standard way without any possibility of export. Of course, that enhances vendor lock-in, so why not? But the users should be aware that inevitably will lead to stories like this - my software vendor screwed me over and I have no way to recover my data now! Fortunately, in this case there were third-party tool that were able to export the data - but in many cases the same vendor would fight tooth and nail with such tool vendors to shut them down for "copyright", "patent protection" and whatever else reasons.