Winer is certainly a piece of work. In a post that talks about the mapping choices made by Microsoft in their feed API, he says this:

Dave Johnson experiments with the Microsoft Feeds API, and finds they've made some unusual choices, which may not be good for interop. The solution of course is to parse the XML yourself, and it's definitely not too late for the community to provide the equivalent of the Microsoft toolkit, if perhaps the community can discuss such a thing without flaming out.

Without flaming out? Now why do you suppose that happens? You might wander over to the RSS Public mailing list, where people were discussing exactly this kind of issue. The whole thing flamed out alright - as soon as Dave showed up and spewed venom all over the forum. Why did Microsoft make the choices they made? Because in the absence of a tight spec, that's the sort of thing that happens. They made their best guesses, just like I and every other aggregator developer did. If there were a tight spec, that wouldn't happen as much. Can we get that? No, we can't, and here are Dave's *cough* words of wisdom *cough* on that subject:

It's not that I want it to remain ambiguous, it *has* to remain ambiguous, because the roadmap says so.

It takes the decision out of everyone's hands, no one can change the spec, because the SPEC SAYS IT CAN'T BE CHANGED.

So he spouts that, and then - today - acts stunned that developers working with RSS might come up with different interpretations of the spec, since it is - in his words - ambiguous. He's not only a mean spirited, bitter man - he's an incompetent, mean spirited, bitter man.