I guess in the end, it depends on why you want to use RSS. For me, and many, I think, it’s a way to quickly and on a ongoing basis aggregate content from many sources into one place, sorted by category. To do this it needs to be “real simple” and fast.

I’ve tried a few offline and online readers. To me, Google Reader is indeed the best for just the reason you describe. When I use it, I’m online, so it’s one click to the website of the original blog. Otherwise, I get the content update I want, and a quick check as to whether keyword feed searches came up with anything interesting.

But to each their own — the overall point is that if you’re going to reach people where they are, you need to find ways to help them happen upon your content — whether by subscription or search.

I’m not a reviewer, but I’ve tried a few offline and online readers

Then a friend pointed me to Google’s (of course) reader, which consolidates as many websites as you like, lets you organize them into folders, and lets you see the original posting. It’s kind of the “software as a service” version of RSS. Sounds great, right? Well, you don’t get all the images and you can’t see the comments.

So I guess we’re still waiting for that perfect RSS app.