Blogs suffered from the inability to provide a good reading platform
I think you're going to have to explain what you mean by good here, given that you mention there was a good reading platform and it was killed in favour of the monetizable web by the chief web monetizer.
No, I don't think GReader was good. It had the potential to be great, but it was the bare minimum. It had, however, the necessary lead to leverage the distributed Web into something that could threaten Facebook. Instead they chose to start from scratch and do Facebook in shades of red.
I think you're going to have to explain what you mean by good here, given that you mention there was a good reading platform and it was killed in favour of the monetizable web by the chief web monetizer.