Back then the only alternatives were either commercial with shitty data policies or TTRSS which scared me away as it back then was probably the most hostile open source project on GitHub.
So I rolled my own. I will probably port it to use SQL so I can do easy searching when my kids move out :)
I don't understand why you rolled your own server. Feedly works great. If you did it because it's a fun project, that's awesome! But it certainly isn't necessary if your goal is just to subscribe to RSS feeds.