Too bad it's ugly and has lots of ux-quirks.

Yeah, I finally tried out NewsBlur yesterday after waiting as long as possible to decide on a replacement. There's a lot going on there. I think I've more or less figured out what it's all for and how to navigate around, but one thing is still bugging me -- what's that orange triangle on the left of the feed area, that follows the cursor around unless you "lock" it, for?! Totally unexplained ux element.

I think (but am not certain) that when any part of an article moves past the orange triangle, it is marked as read.

Yes, this. I was confused by it too until I uncovered that in a GetSatisfaction thread. If you lock it about 1/4 of the way from the top, the auto mark-read behavior is like GReader.

It should probably default to being locked...

One of my favorite things about Newsblur is how minutely configurable it is, but I think all of that is probably throwing off new users.

You don't find it buggy? For example, right now it claims several of my feeds are 404 and it won't let me fix them -- I have to delete and re-add them.

It's super buggy! Dupes articles and it's happened twice when long reading sessions were lost without any indication of error - the "read" state of tens, maybe hundreds of articles were not updated. I've seen the code on GitHub in the past - it was a ball of pasta.

I find exactly which feeds are 404 varies, so I believe it is an upstream issue in the feed itself.

The "fix a misbehaving feed" dialog claims every URL I give it is 404. And now it has helpfully renamed all my broken feeds to "[Untitled]" so I can't tell them apart in the list.

File a bug report: https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur/issues

Weird, I have no bugs at all. No 404, no other problems.