I have many difficulties getting th RSS and such to work with Drupal. I want to mention that I have been spoiled with Wordpress who have really solid implementation. Their model is far more extensive, and advanced. I think considering the number of people posting around and developing modules, it's worth it to start improving the Drupal implementation of these.
Specifically: It is important to recognize that the line between rss feeds, podcasting, video podcasting, and now photocasting are becoming somewhat blurred. One common feed is likely to have the information to cover all of the above mentioned outlets. However Drupal depends on modules to implement all of them separately, and most of the modules are quite underdeveloped.
I think it would be a major step forward for Drupal to generate feeds which can discriminate and decypher various terms. That is, I could choose an RSS feed which is centred around "sports" (or any other category I choose), by a different URL. The linked RSS file which would become present on all pages, could then could contain the variables to make such a discrimiation possible.
The media thing becomes important, because a given feed could simultaneously generate the proper syntax to support podcasts, and video podcasts. If I'm not mistaken, the extra syntax will not affect the rest of the feed, and will be simply ignored if being read by a simple RSS reader. In other words, one dynamic generator script, applied universaly throughout the site, which can be category specific, and has media links in the proper ____casting format.