Thanks for the focus on gPodder, I hope to work on more/better error feedback in the future, it’s on the to-do list.
One thing that I think is important to note - gPodder was originally developed by Thomas Perl (@thp) and I am standing on his giant shoulders continueing the development and maintenance together with the other contributors and translators (@carmenfdezb @eson @sfbg and many others).
We actually released 4.16 (“Mesirut” - devotion, loyalty and/or dedication) at the beginning of the week it is on OpenRepos and in the QA queue on harbour, the release mainly brings some changes in allowing users to configure certain things and sadly we had to disable gpodder.net integration.
Lastly to make giving feedback easier we have a dedicated topic here - https://forum.sailfishos.org/t/gpodder-feedback