Recently I wrote a suite of PHP4 classes for handling intellegent writing and reading of syndication feeds.
The suite uses a Factory Pattern approach to constructing an appropriate object to read a feed given a feed url, or to write a feed given a format. Each object (obviously) uses the same interface to provide access to the items and feed meta-data.
I have readers and writers for RSS 0.92, RDF 1.0, RSS 2.0 and Atom 0.3 available.
The code is under the ZLIB license as I wrote it with two initial uses in mind, the first being to re-vamp the Geeklog syndication system, the second being a commercial PHP application I am working on.
This should make it a viable option for integration into agregator.module for 4.6 to provide a more flexible and extensible way of handling feeds, plus providing more format options out of the box. The same classes could be used to generate the feeds that Drupal provides itself, or for any other module.