This is one usecase where I'm thankful for AI: to help generate a bunch of documents in a well structured manner (giving it audience, having it scan through my comments on why I did xyz, etc)
Opera was my secret weapon back in the day: if it worked in Opera, it would be guaranteed to work in Chrome, IE and Firefox. It significantly reduced the browser quirks stuff I'd have to dig into.
Dragonfly was top notch also: one of the best bits was ability to outline all the elements on the page. There were other features too that weren't (still aren't) in the other browser dev tools
I'd be super happy if they left Windows alone and did just this for years to come. Use the other products to make money, and just maintain this Win 2000/7/10 type OS without new features, and stop trying to hide everything behind fancy UI. I still revert back to old control panels to do the necessary tweaks.
I hope there's more to it than something solvable with AutoHotkey...
So far I just experience a buggier version of Windows 10 with features I don't want.
Big assumption there... chances are they would rather keep the money or spend it elsewhere, instead of "unnecessarily" upgrading when things still work
This may or may not help, but have a look at ZorinOS. The latest release and it's announcement is targeted towards those wanting to jump ship from Windows -> Linux. They've tried to account for the adjustment with built-in tips/prompts and the UI looks closer to Windows also.
I use BazQux (https://bazqux.com/) as it was the closest to the old Google Reader I could find.
The developer also set up their own instance of FiveFilters Full Text Rss (https://www.fivefilters.org/full-text-rss/) for use with that reader to do fetch the content. I typically use this as proxy for any feeds I'm going to add where the author didn't provide the full text.
Other than that:
* The BazQux web interface has a button to fetch the full text content of the article.
* As you noted, FeedMe on Android can also switch to web mode to fetch full content.
I prefer the Five Filters way because then I can go through my feeds offline while in transit
Most non-technical people I know that have VPNs simply have it for streaming media from platforms that geo-restrict. It's a cat and mouse game as the provider bans servers/providers.