Counterpoint, I've been using yarr almost daily for about a year and I can't say I share any of your wishlist items. I love how simple and elegant it is, and anything that makes the UI more complex or distracting would only take away from that.

I run it on a VPS so I can access it from phone+laptop and it looks great everywhere. I've only "augmented" it by throwing a basic rss bridge on the same server (well, the bridge is really single-file python script that generates rss feeds from other sources).