After Google Reader I haven't been able to use an RSS reader ever since. IMHO the competition often tries far too hard to make the UI pretty.
I don't need minimalism, over-complicated UIs, personalized reccomandations and so on. I don't need social sharing (on the desktop at the least).
I need a fast, easy to follow, predictable UI. An easy way to categorize feeds. I would like to be able to read and save my OPML in the cloud (a github gist, a Google Drive document, etc) and possibly use on another device with the same app or possibly even with another. On the mobile side, it would be great if the reader was a progressive webapp rather than an android/iphone application.