That's the beauty of RSS, people can tailor it to their needs and wants. If I saw thousands of unread items, I'd shut down and give up. On the flip side, if you had my feed list, you'd probably feel like you were missing a ton of stuff. But we can both make it work for us.

I did have a job where I got 10k email per day for a good 10 years, so I probably have some PTSD from that. I'd feel like I was right back there if I had thousands of items per day in my RSS reader. I've been out of that stage of my job for a good 8 years, and I'm just now starting to get a handle on my email again, after feeling like there was no way to control it for so long.