on a more meaningful note: great post! i’ve sunk a bit of time into this myself, so it’s always nice to see how someone else does it.
personally, i’ve centralized on a traditional feed reader (NewsBlur) similar to how you’ve centralized on IRC. i don’t mind the inbox/unread model, mostly because i ruthlessly prune my list of feeds down to individual people i know personally and want to follow, plus other sites that are generally low volume and announcement only. no news, entertainment, etc feeds, since plugging those into an inbox model is definitely counterproductive. (more of my thoughts on batching and pruning here.)
also, like your twitter searches in IRC, twitter-atom, facebook-atom, and instagram-atom are crucial for my personal reading UX. getting those into my feed reader means i only have three inboxes total: personal email, work email, and reader. inbox-per-silo, no thanks.