http://fred.rachelbythebay.com/ - is that sufficiently dense? I came up with it after realizing I didn't want any of the left, top, or bottom gunk in Reader. All I do is flip, flip, flip. Just keep pushing right (or sometimes, left, if you catch something neat and want to go back!)...
It's interesting, but I have ~200 feeds in 5 categories, and would like to be able to browse by:
1) see list of all feeds with unread counts (I don't see how to do that as a guest user)
2) click on a feed, see all articles in the feed (bold unread) (you sort of do this now, but indicating read v unread would be nice)
3) per-story, read in a dense but nicely-formatted way (Feedly does this great; yours is ok. Ideally be able to Instapaper too)
4) (optional) figure out which new articles in which feeds I care most about and "magic" those as well -- maybe using an interface like yours, or a "magazine" like feedly
I really have two modes of using RSS: reading as much as possible of those feeds, or wanting to be passively entertained. I'd potentially use two tools with a common backend.
I don't understand why someone doesn't do as close to a direct clone of Google Reader UI/UX as possible, and then clone Google Reader backend (e.g. the "Normandy" project).
