Some of us are upgrading and engaging in the kind of poking around you do at times like these. For instance, we are just scrolling through our db tables and finding lots of junk in spam comments and rss feeds. The spam comments are easy enough to scrub away. As for the RSS stuff that we find in wp_options, this seems like the most intelligent thing to say, courtesy of Lunabyte:

“Those fields are the cache for incoming RSS feeds. Like on the dashboard, rss widget, etc. No, they aren’t exactly efficient, but that’s what they are. What its intended to do is cache the remote feed, therefore hitting your database instead of the remote site however many times. It’s updated at an interval, etc. It should be clearing/updating on its own, and if you clear it yourself they will just be replaced.”

OK, I’m looking around my study right now. Sure I want a cleaner database, but who am I to complain about clutter? I figure if I want to get angry about a few MBs of RSS feed, I could at least reduce my hypocrisy by re-shelving fifty books. Thank you WordPress for not raising the bar on tidyness too high.