I think I'm missing something here, but I don't see what the big controversy is over echo and RSS.
As many others have already pointed out, RSS and Echo are not mutually exclusive - it's not one or the other, and they can co-exist much as sites expose RSS 0.9, RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0.
At the end of the day, it's just XML. (And in case you missed it, there's this XSLT thing which happens to be very good at converting from one format to another).
I wonder if the critics would be spewing the same rhetoric if Echo was output from Dave Winer and branded as RSS 3.0 instead of an on-going community process (which I already said Dave should be a part of).
The concept of RSS is good, but the specification has significant flaws (which I'm not going to rehash again). It needs to be fixed. I've heard many compelling reasons to move towards a new format, and very few that convinced me otherwise.
In fact, the more I hear the logic used by the RSS camp (Gary Santoro and Adam Curry are good examples), the more convinced I am that we need echo.
Sometimes I'm amazed by the logic that goes on in some people's heads.