Need help understand how to customizing RSS feeds with CCK fields and views templates?

Hi,

I'm trying to figure out the best way to deal with creating a custom RSS feed that includes CCK fields with a custom display.

Right now, I have a view, and then I use custom node templates in my theme to deal with displaying each post. I've got a LOT of display fu in my node templates.

You can see how it looks here: http://elly.org/journals

My journals are just a regular view, filtered by node type etc, and I've created an RSS feed view style for this view, but I have two problems

1. I can't get the CCK fields (the node references, and the custom text fields) to show up in the RSS feed's element, even though they are in the $content object and I've specified how they should display in RSS under CCK's 'display fields' config section

and

2. I don't know how to customize how those fields are displayed. For instance, if I could get the node reference fields spitting out into , how would I force them to display only the image like I'm doing in the node template?

Hopefully this question makes sense... I've been reading the forums about CCK fields and RSS, and found a few posts, but I couldn't figure out the best approach from reading them. Some posts, like this one seem to have some hints and suggest that I should be using a custom view style template. I tried creating one, but I couldn't figure out how to get the node object into that template to work with, or whether the fields I wanted were available to me from the view object there.

Can anyone give me a push in the right direction? I want each of the items in my feed to look basically just like my posts look on my page!

Thanks!