> and the early popularity and widespread adoption of RSS, the better format (atom) isn't used nearly as much.

That may have been true 20 years ago, but now that pretty much no-one uses either of them , I'd be surprised if RSS was still meaningfully more widespread than Atom. (Except everything is being called RSS).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49141336 is the only valid response to your VHS/Betamax comparison, really.

I use RSS multiple times daily.