Feed Reader Decisions

A while ago I talked about authenticated RSS feeds (those that require a user name and password so the world cannot grab them) and readers that can handle them.  Newsgator is a popular reader that can handle them...and deliver feeds via email by the way.

I tried to use it for 30 days and have found the following compared to Bloglines and even Google Reader:

1. Newsgator seems slow. It's refreshes are at least double the time that it takes for Bloglines to do the same.  When your used to Ferrari, it's hard to go Yugo.
2. Newsgator's user interface just seems more difficult to read.  Maybe it's smaller font size...but I don't prefer how it breaks apart let's say 100+ entries into multiple "pages" that one must click through.  Since I had it set to "mark all as read" when I entered the category, it took me a few times of missing more than half the posts to realize that I hadn't clicked over to "page 2". 
3. I have never really gotten the email delivery to just "work".  It worked a few times but when I set up newsgator the first time, it defaulted everything to arrive via email too...thus I received 1000+ emails over a 1 hour period.  This is probably user error on set up but it happened.
4. The "settings" tab is not so intuitive.  It took a long time for me to extract the method for exporting the OPML file.  I'm comparing this to Bloglines where the export function is clearly exposed on the home screen.
5. I think Newsgator is well positioned as an enterprise RSS tool, but even as a paying subscriber, I've gone back to Bloglines for now and I'm reading and getting through my RSS feeds as fast as I used to.

The key decision point for me came when I realized I was AVOIDING feed reading because I knew it would take so long.