Well, I'm not on the CT and don't have much time to check into the coding issues. But here are a couple of suggestions.
1) Review the issues reported in the bugtracker. support.dotnetnuke.com/project/Project.aspx - if it's not an official 'bug' then, no one is really doing much with it, so report it.
2) Folks do monitor the forums, but mostly these days, seems like more user issues are dealth with here than actual code fixes. Just my impression.
3) I've used the XML/XSL module for display of RSS newsfeeds, seems to work with less issues for some. Give it try. All you would need is to specify a XSL for the newsfeed. I've posted many custom examples, so you should be able to find one suitable, if you can't find the default xsl used for the news feed module, location depends on which version of dnn you use.
Cheers