A good deal of your critique is a rehash of concerns people expressed about RSS in the first place. They generally did not come to pass because either they wer

A good deal of your critique is a rehash of concerns people expressed about RSS in the first place. They generally did not come to pass because either they weren't real problems in the first place, they were easily addressed, or general advances in technology moved faster than their onset. You are concerned about the inefficiency of fetching all the items in a feed when just one item changes. Is that a real issue? Consider your use case. How much data is really being requested? If it is a real issue, the server might want to limit the # of entries returned based on the if-modified-since header. As for the load of all that traffic hitting the server in the space of a few seconds, ngnix can push a lot of requests on modest hardware and the load on whatever application logic is involved in generating the feed can be knocked way down by having it cache all feed requests for a second or two.