@jamey I know what you mean about feed subscription. On elementary, between FeedReader, News, & Vocal all the apps use a prompt dialog for feed subscription. And while the FreeDesktop.Org standards have a spec for controlling music players, they don't for FeedReaders.
And that's a problem as without a protocol to bridge between browsers, etc and feed readers we end up with tight-coupling that discourages competition.
@jamey If you want to encourage this experimentation (at least on the free desktops), you could try drafting and pushing a standard. I could draft it too, but I'm afraid that if I drafted it supporting the standard would be "integrating into Odysseus". And that's not want I want it to be.
If you choose to do that, I'd recommend you take a look at MPRIS: https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/mpris-spec/ to get you started.