Here’s an interesting perspective from Slate:

“[...]But RSS started to bring me down. You know that sinking feeling you get when you open your e-mail and discover hundreds of messages you need to respond to—that realization that e-mail has become another merciless chore in your day?[...]” (from Slate Magazine)

Of course we here at BlogBridge strenuously disagree

• If you need to read hundreds of blogs, say as part of your job, then there’s no other choice than using a powerful reader like BlogBridge
• Also, don’t think as blog reading like email reading. There’s no reason to read every single post in blogs you care about! You can skim, you can use SmartFeeds to identify posts that talk about what you care about and just read those, you can rate and rank your feeds.
• Remember also that RSS readers nowadays are much more than RSS readers. BlogBridge especially sits as kind of your high productivity cockpit in the middle of the avalanche of content, blogs, news, tweets, tags, and so on and so forth, and also allows you to be very efficient about contributing and responding back over each of those channels.

So yes, if you read 5 or 10 feeds then an RSS Reader is mostly a pain, but if you are required to keep up with hundreds and even thousands of feeds, then something like BlogBridge is priceless!