Ranchero Software tech support eventually swooped in to the rescue, telling me that not only was my seemingly-expired copy of NetNewsWire merely exhibiting a bug, but that I was still entitled to an upgrade to version 3. Which is great! There aren't really any substantial improvements that I've found (other than actually working), but it gives me a useless-but-beautiful Growl notification when feeds are done refreshing, which I appreciate.

While I was adrift, RSS-wise, I tried signing up for the Vienna software development forum to see if I couldn't contribute my full text RSS algorithm to the project. Unfortunately, the registration form is broken — seems like they must not want patches all that badly.