Is there a decent panel applet RSS reader for Linux?  I've been using Firefox add-ons, but I've decided I want notifications of new items even when I'm not running Firefox.  The feed readers I've tried so far are unsuitable for various reasons.

Akregator - Posts are sorted by title by default, and clicking on a column header doesn't change the sort field or sort order.

Liferea - UI stops responding while feeds are updating or a search is being processed, with lots of disk activity.

Blam - Delete key doesn't delete feeds, can't remove multiple feeds at once, removing default feeds requires too many steps.  Once I finally got a feed added, clicking on a news item opened /usr/share/blam/themes/blam/ instead of displaying the contents of the article!  Plus the icon's ugly and it uses mono.

What's the deal?  Why are there several broken RSS readers instead of one good one?