I don’t love dependencies (as you know) but RSS is one of those things where it’s better to have a battle-tested library because there are a lot of edge cases in the real world. HTML also used to be one of those things until everyone sat down, wrote down all of the edge cases (html5), and said “enough”. And then there’s Markdown, where they tried to write down the edge cases but it didn’t work (lol).
I think if I was writing a new RSS parser right now I would collect a large corpus of feeds and test against a well-worn parser. That should surface the bugs quickly enough.
