Fragmentation is also choice and the potential for new and better things to emerge.
I think the user facing side of RSS and the other metaphors and conventions around podcasts are broken. Discovery is broken. So, I'm ok with fragmentation. Maybe there is a better way out there to be discovered.
If they are primarily worried about people having trouble downloading podcasts for whatever reason, it seems like they could have saved themselves a lot of work by just contacting some of the biggest podcast apps on the market (BeyondPod I think is the biggest) about making it easy to subscribe to this particular feed. They could make a custom-built plugin that just installs the feed, they could potentially license a special distribution of the app that has the feed pre-installed.
Fragmentation of the audio listening market is really not justified and is not really going to help anything.