Yes, smart lists. So, example when news about the Queen flooded my feeds, I made “smart feed” (in ReadKit) that matched `not read && (“title contains Queen” || “title contains Royal” …)` similar to a “smart mailbox” in apple mail, and using the mac’s system widget for generating such filters.
That way I could quickly scan down the list, read any I wanted to (few — they were mostly the same) and then mark all as read with a couple of keystrokes.
I have a huge “Junk” filter (podcasts, stories about movies, other crud I don’t want) that I scan first and mass-mark-as-read. I have topic-selective “feeds” like the Ukraine war, climate change, etc.
In fact I read my feeds almost exclusively using these topic filters, and only at the end look at the remaining unread. Much more convenient. It’s especially handy if you read a bunch of, say, NYT feeds as they cross post a lot. So I’ll see four or more NYT articles that are the same but not all posted at the same time and were posted in business, technology, science, etc. I just read one (or mine) and easily nuke the rest right away.
Some highlights from NNW 3.2:
> Smart Lists: Gather news from all your feeds based on your criteria. It's like smart playlists in iTunes - only for news instead of music.
> Search-Result Subscriptions: Make special subscriptions that display results from search engines or from keyword searches.
> Scripted Feeds: Generate custom RSS and Atom feeds via AppleScript, Perl, Python, Ruby, and other scripting languages.
Not sure which of these features the parent was referring to but in NetNewsWire 3.2 you had options.