Sorry you're totally wrong about this. RSS feeds from this board are limited to titles. They would need to display the entire HTML-formatted text to compensate, and you shouldn't need to worry about an RSS client as you move from your Mac or PC to a mobile device.
With our vB forum (forum.theparacast.com), which we hope to migrate to XF in a few weeks, we get 50-300 messages a day. So it's a medium-sized board. My four moderators and I receive email notices of every post, with all text. We don't have to sit on the board and wait for messages to arrive, so we can go about our business and still handle critical board matters. If a post is informational, we just read it and go to the next. If it requires admin action or a response, we can act appropriately.
With an IMAP email account, assuming the server supports the Idle command, messages arrive almost as soon as they are posted. I can't imagine a more efficient way to keep tabs on a forum. Some of us have day jobs, although my sites and two weekly radio shows are my day jobs.
Understand that I have worked on message systems since the 1980s, when I was a frequenter of newsgroups. I also worked as a salaried forum leader for AOL for a number of years. I've established forums running SMF, MyBB, phpBB, vB, and now XF, not to mention a few free hosted services. I think I know my way around this game. I welcome better ideas, but I think getting fully-formatted email notices of all posts (which should be an option for board moderators and admins in XF, but an improved version of this add-on will fill the bill) is the most effective way to keep tabs on what's going on.