YES! Thank you, Brian, for writing this up. I loathe that phrase, it grates on my nerves every time I come across it, and I've been noticing it more frequently

YES! Thank you, Brian, for writing this up. I loathe that phrase, it grates on my nerves every time I come across it, and I've been noticing it more frequently too. When writing or speaking, I usually use "I think" instead -- if I don't have some kind of factual statement to make at the ready -- but that seems off-putting to the "I feel like" people. I have a slightly less charitable opinion of the motivations behind "I feel like" that you partly touched on: because feelings are supposed to be unassailable, "I feel like" allows someone to state their opinion without fear of having to back it up with any kind of consideration, so people get to say silly things with equal or even greater weight of less silly things. "I feel like Mitt Romney would be a bad President" doesn't invite quite the same argument that "Mitt Romney would be a bad President" does.