People don't want to have to customize refresh rates on a per-feed basis. Perhaps the RSS or Atom standards need to support importing the recommended refresh rate automatically.
They don't need to change the refresh rate, though. They need to make conditional requests with an etag or a last-modified date, so the server can respond with a 304 not modified if no changes have been made.
No standards need to be updated. The client software needs to be a better HTTP citizen.
What about people who reside in the same place who have multiple RSS aggregators that scrape the same RSS? Her analysis will not handle that I think. At some point she is going to have to talk to the engineers that made it if she wants something done. Or she could take it upon herself to fix the software (at least the ones that are open-source). If she's just sharing the investigation then it's fine. But if the goal is to get the problems fixed, whining to us is probably the least efficient way to do it. She is knowledgeable enough to fix probably half of the RSS readers that she is complaining about and definitely knowledgeable enough to engage with all of them about fixing their code.