Weaknesses of Google Reader

I regularly use Google Reader and on the whole am fairly satisfied with it, but there are a few interface features that aggravate me.

1. Unread count maxes out at 1,000.  When I’m over 1k and trying to catch up, it’d be nice to know how much progress I’m making.
2. Tag bloat.  In an early incarnation I tried doing a fair number of different tags to classify my archives.  Unfortunately tags are intermixed with folders and this makes it difficult to organize things into folders because I’ve got a list 100+ choices.
3. Consolidating tags is hard.  I’m willing to limit myself to a small number of tags, but mass renames have to be done manually.  Also tags with no items still need to be deleted manually and the delete screen doesn’t tell you what has only one item.
4. Reading items when offline doesn’t appear to properly sync up when you get back online.  Obviously you still gain any relevant knowledge, but this makes backlog clearing harder.

I’m hoping once I deal with these bloody tags I’ll be able to create a reading and organizing system that actually helps me skim through my feeds and avoid a big backlog.  I’ve created a skim folder and that helps some, but in and of itself it doesn’t appear to do the job.  I think I should probably also create a must-read folder and by default err towards only reading headlines with all other folders.