Dave Winer:

The roadmap actually encourages risk, but some people always seem to want to have their ideas accepted without taking the risk. They think they can make something better than RSS and shouldn't have to go through the same vetting process that RSS itself went through. Now, it may be possible that after three years in the market, that RSS 2.0 could be radically improved, but the roadmap says that no person or group of people has the exclusive right to improve it, and that no one can interfere with the stability of the platform. That's no different if you work for a small company or large, or don't work for a company at all.

He's referring obliquely to the RSS advisory board, (which has a public mailing list here) - which is trying to nail down a few things that are ambiguous in the spec (if you can call it that) for RSS. For instance:

• What should you expect to find in the <description> field?
• Is one enclosure the maximum?
• Is markup allowed, not allowed, or optional in the <title> element?

Those aren't things that have gone through a "vetting" process; they are things that tool developers have suffered with for years, and - if Winer has his way - we'll continue to suffer with. RSS is marginally better defined than OPML and MetaWebLog API (this page 404's at the moment), which are other underspecified formats that Winer has produced. There's a reason Atom exists, and that reason is amply demonstrated every single time Dave speaks on the subject.