I think you missed some things in my comment.
I have an RSS reader and it has social features. I'm happy with it and have used RSS pretty much continuously from its early days. I agree with you, on paper feature-for-feature, my RSS Reader of choice today is better than what Google Reader was in many ways. What it doesn't have versus Google Reader, where I still draw some small
nostalgia for Google Reader is Google's
network effect (nor does it have Facebook's or Twitter's).
You found it weird that people are so nostalgic about Google Reader and said you didn't see why people are so nostalgic about it: my point was that a big thing that people who are nostalgic for Google Reader miss both directly and indirectly was its social features and their network effect. At Google Reader's peak I did have non-technical friends that had no idea what RSS was or how it worked, but they followed a bunch of their friends socially in "that reading thing connected to Gmail" and sometimes picked up that they could subscribe to other feeds just by subscribing to feeds they saw in friends' feeds. That was a big deal for almost-mainstream adoption. Most of that has moved to other social media today (Facebook and Twitter) and that's why "RSS is dead" according to all the headlines, but for a brief period Google Reader was people's "Twitter" and rather than top-posting short quips and a link to an article some of the time every "tweet" was bottom-posted in reply to articles. ("It was a more cultured social media for a more civilized age," in old man words.)
It's not unlikely that you don't have nostalgia for Google Reader simply because you weren't even indirectly aware of its social features. I'd wager a lot of the people that truly have nostalgia for did take some advantages of its social features. I know some friends anecdotally who still don't know what RSS is today but are still nostalgic for Google Reader. I've tried to convince a few of them to join me on my RSS Reader of choice and I can use its social features to teach some it in a similar way to how we all used to use Google Reader, but "no one" but me is still left in my RSS Reader of choice among that original group and most "everyone" is on Twitter or Facebook. It was the network effect that made Google Reader nearly mainstream, that put RSS to the closest to the mainstream it may ever get.