I think it's little appreciated that planets solve many of the practical problems of feed crawling.
If you wanted to follow 2000 blogs yourself you'd find it is really a hassle. You can follow one planet and its easy.
For that matter, if 2000 people want to follow your blog (and many other blogs) they are going to generate 2000 requests per polling period. It is not wonder why people like [1] get so exasperated. There are three kinds of polling periods: (1) too fast, (2) too slow, (3) both at the same time. Instead of having 2000 people poll your blog too often, one planet can poll your blog. It improves the scalability and economics of the system dramatically.
(e.g. the difficulty of finding a good polling regime is one of 10 or 20 or so unappreciated reasons why RSS has remained nerdcore)
Data point 3: does not work for me. Also using NetNewsWire. “Throttled or blocked” changes nothing, if it’s down for half of visitors then it’s down for half of visitors. I highly doubt NetNewsWire is breaching spec or poorly behaved. I bet rachelbythebay is just throttling by IP address and really has a 24 hour limit of exactly 1, so only one person per IP per day can subscribe.
I'm on the Feedly train boat too since the sinking of Google Reader. Besides the ai bs it doesn't really let you search something in your feeds without a subscription, so once I tried Feedbin.
But I went back because third world issues (and not a fan of microtransactions either) I could not find a way (if any) to change the layout on desktop. I really like the minimal list view at Feedly (and even on mobile too).
big fan of feedmail [1] for a "dumb" reader. It just delivers it to your inbox. I have a folder set up called "feed" and I can do all the email things to the items landing in that folder. Every email costs a credit, you can buy 10 000 credits for $10, which works out to $0.001 per article.
The only thing it misses is any sort of highlight saving deal, but for those I just save the article to zotero and annotate it there.
A good way to find interesting blogs is to subscribe to a few planets.
These are essentially aggregations of blog related to some project/topic.
https://planet.gnome.org/ https://planet.kde.org/ https://planet.mozilla.org/ https://planet.documentfoundation.org/
PS. If you know any good planets worth skimming, please add to below :)
That said, I don't really have a good RSS reader that syncs across devices. I currently use Feedly, but it tries to be too smart.