Parsing feeds has always been one of the more unpleasant parts of Downcast's codebase. Much of that is to blame on the fact that podcast feeds, RSS & Atom, are XML based. XML is incredibly powerful, but nearly all of that power is lost on simple podcast feeds. They could easily be expressed using JSON.
So, I was excited to learn that there's a brand new alternative now, JSON Feed. I hope it quickly becomes the goto podcast feed format. That will only happen if software gets updated to support it.
I will be gleefully adding support for JSON Feed in Downcast v3!