I don't know a person who uses RSS and I am in college and all my friends are engineers. I think hackers often mistake their friends as representative of the national demographic. I bet more people type URLs into Google search than use RSS. Seriously, have you ever noticed how many internet users type www.cnn.com into a Google search box? That is probably the median level of internet proficiency in this country.
Most of my non-hacker friends use some sort of feed reader. They know that RSS lets them read blog posts in their feedreader without visiting the blog, even though they may not know the format specifications.