It's all been very instructive. The bad news is that a lot of dirty laundry has been hung out. The good new is that it's being exposed to the open air. I suspect(though I can't prove) that RSS is the most popular, widely-used application of XML. Figuring out how to use namespaces in RSS is going to be good for the RSS community, and good for XML.
RSS Namespaces
it seems that adding namespaces to rss 2.0 breaks almost the whole rss infrastructure. this is a good thing, as it will lead to xml-compliant rss parsers, and since rss is probably the most popular xml application, it will drive adoption of higher-end xml functionality through the back door.