I am migrating my app from rss to atom and realized something- a problem I thought was limited to rss occurs with atom as well.
Here's the problem: sometimes, even within a matter of minutes, a feed "loses" the latest item and then gets it back. This is supremely annoying. I thought switching to an atom feed would fix this but it has not. This is besides the issue of the feeds not keeping up with twitter- but I think you already know about this.