Mark Pilgrim has a good overview of the incompatibilities between the nine different flavors of RSS. They're all small things, but with significant impact - especially because the RSS 0.91-0.94 and RSS 2.0 flavors seem to stem from Dave Winer's whims (including his preferred way of capitalizing). While "death by committee" is bad (and is what makes SOAP such a terrifying experience, in my view), common formats based on the whims of one man who seems to pay little attention to the world outside his own are equally bad.
It's not like I think I could ever do better. And while I'm not really fond of RSS 2.0, its support of XML namespaces was - to me - a good thing (that RSS 1.0 seemed to already offer). This is what allowed me to separate the content of a post from the description - because, by gods (if you choose to believe in such things), there's a difference! A pretty significant difference, in my view.
I still hope that Atom can find that cozy place between the whims of one man and death-by-committee.