Absolutely baffling. I currently use G+ as a newsfeed for publications with a G+ presence (which is most of them), but it's been a long time coming and still lacks for significant user interaction with stories. There's no reason why Google couldn't have figured out some way to import existing RSS feeds.

That embrace would probably have killed off RSS within a couple years anyway, since native G+ posts have more attractive window dressing, but the move would have been a dead simple way to build an instant, passionate userbase that could have taken advantage of G+'s commenting and sharing features while providing a meta-view of how users like to sort sources into Circles.

G+ could easily have been marketed as Reader 2.0, married to Facebook 2.0 for social, Instagram 2.0 for advanced photo features, and Dropbox 2.0 for hoarding. I have no idea how Google dropped the ball at the endzone.