Excellent point Danny. Let me explain.
Yes. You are right. One legitimate use of rss feeds is to get your content syndicated on other sites. The right way for it to be done is to have your partial post ( a teaser) published on other sites with a click through to your site to read the rest.
One hand washes the other. They get a little fresh automatic updated content and you get the potential click-thru traffic.
Illegitimate variations of this is the problem my original post was addressing.
1. Some sites just pull the content, do not link back and give no credit to the source.
2. Other sites pull the content and link back. However, they also post their link into the comments section on your site and include all kinds of low quality very spammy links out from your site.
What I do with these losers in case #2, which happens to
http://www.horndog.com every day is delete their comments that are embedded with links, but my link gets left up on their site. They are too lazy and stupid to do any real manual work, so they don't even notice that they got deleted but my link is still up on their site. Their sites are completely automated.
This is easily managed because I use the Akismet plugin that catches all of these without even publishing them. Whenever I want, at my leisure, I can come in and press one button and delete all of them in one click.