Right, it didn't turn up in the exploratory survey or in the interviews. Well, also we wanted to know how developers use Twitter ... the API I guess wasn't that important at least to the people we talked to. Some said in the initial survey that they had switched to App.net though, but it was only a tiny fraction that we weren't able to talk to. As we say in our study, our results are not generalizable, so there may still be several other issues lurking that we didn't catch in this study.
Then again, RSS is how "tech savvy" (incl developers) would use twitter. Sorry I digress, maybe I do take RSS too seriously. But for me it is really important to draw a distinction in how a service is consumed. Using a website often means the possibility of being unconsciously engaged, thus spending there more than the desired time.
Well, most of the developers we talked to were professional developers, so they probably were tech-savvy. Maybe the removal of RSS happened so long ago that nobody's really frustrated by it anymore -- either you use a client (CLI if you want, "t" is neat) or you move on to something else?
I do not get why I shouldn't be able to consume their information using the universal RSS.
Guess that this issue was not included on the survey.