Chris, I fully agree with your opinion.
I use a mac mini with 512 Mo RAM.
* I almost never use Dashboard because it's sooooo long to swap everything before it appears --> Dashboard is a memory eater.
* Automator sucks: I tried to perform a simple task with it. I managed to get it roughly, but was unable to have it working PROPERLY in every cases. Then, I gave up and tried to do it with Applescript, which I had never used before. I would not say it has been easy with Applescript, but I actually made it.
--> Automator needs more actions, more action parameters, and overall, FLOW BRANCHES.
* The Safari RSS is indeed quite useless, and has nothing to do here. It mimics a news behaviour, with it's "new articles".
I really prefer the NetNewsWire or Thunderbird way. At least, Safari should provide a mean to "delete" articles which we don't want to see anymore, instead of deleting them only by their age.
In fact, I would find more logical to move it into Mail.app .
* Spotlight is also the one I'm using the most. And I would be happy too to have more control on what it is doing.
Tiger? Where did you go?