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Hammersley's article is not a good reference for this discussion. Winer tried to get adoption on RSS on a broad scale, and pretty much singlehandedly wrote the "spec" as I understand history. I'm not sure Dave quite grokked RDF when he developed RSS, but I'm not sure he didn't, either. I remember when RSS was in its infancy and Winer was trying to find a home for it. He ended up publishing the spec on the userland site. There is still, to this day, no official home for RSS, no adoption within W3C.
I wrote Mastering XML Premium Edition (published in 2000) with Liam Quinn, who is now XML lead for the W3C, and we didn't devote an entire chapter to namepaces but we did point out, sort of, what you have pointed out here, when we mentioned, on page 62, in year the 2000 (actually, it was written a tad earlier), that IE created tons of issues with namespace issues.
One thing software vendors should keep in mind is that if they *DO* change the URI, and they're creating re-usable components (see Adobe acquisition of Macromedia and resultant Flex namespace issues), they need to change the namespace prefix, too, simply to avoid confusion.
But picking on Dave Winer to me seems bizarre. He's been a very serious contributor to many things XML, and the fact that RSS is not standardized through a more formal process, which normally includes a massive vetting process, is a more serious topic than the implementation of a small, insignificant program named Radio that few people remember or care about.
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