As has beennotedoverthelastcoupleof days syndication clients often ignore the finer points of feed retrieval. The Rome
Fetcher is designed to do the right thing in the simplest way possible.
It comes with a decent set of test cases (using an embedded Jetty instance) - although they are currently disabled as they crash Maven (I believe this is a Maven bug).
The other big selling point is that in introduces no new libraries above the requirements used by Rome (ie, JDom beta 10).