While I do agree with Kroc's article completely, and agree RSS should be given a place in which it stands out better, I disagree with your point of view. An RSS feed is an uniform way to provide the news to the user, and thus, in it's whole it should feel uniform. I think the image element, together with the title and description element, are more than enough to define a feed's identity. At most, I think only the elements inside each item's description could be styled with CSS, and should be very limited and only if there is no alternative good styling for these items.
Instead of seeing it as a failure, I see it as a feature, because I don't have sites hurting my eyes with bad stylings (for having the advantage of a rare developer who can do wonders).

About the RSS feeds, I agree that they need more attention. I do think the browser button is not going to work, and so, an alternative way should be made to catch the user's attention of the new feeds. I also think that any current browser implementation for seeing feeds is going to de-motivate users (I disliked feeds when I first saw Firefox's "Live Bookmarks", and only started using them when I was introduced to Google Reader).

I think Firefox could easily implement a special site-specific popup when that site was visited often, introducing feeds. The problem is, popups are problematic. An alternative would be to show text next to the button for the first few times (something like "Press this icon to automatically receive updates from the site"), which is less intrusive than a popup, but would cram the interface. Perhaps it should be up to the site owners themselves to promote and explain the icon, but then it would never get the boost it needs.