Google Reader was a publish-subscribe platform with chronological/per site newsfeed whereas Google+ was a peer-to-peer platform with an algorithm newsfeed. I didn't appreciate the difference at the time, but the philosophy was completely different and I couldn't come up with any idea that could fit Google Reader into the Google+ vision.
This strikes me as similar to the spirit of Reader, though of course without the site-specific subscription of RSS. Conceptually, the idea of including RSS results in the stream wouldn't have been much of a stretch.
Regardless, that feature was axed pretty early in G+ history.
What irked most about the forced amalgamation of G+ and other Google services was the context sheer and violation of boundaries and social significance of various activities. In particular, suddenly G+ conversations based on YouTube links were now listed at YouTube under the video's comments, and comments from YouTube now appeared in G+ discussion streams. I responded by deleting all my own G+ posts of YouTube links, and deleting all content from the linked YouTube account (I'd used it little regardless).
When G+ finally merged G+ and YouTube profiles, after about a year of my repeatedly stating "no, don't do that", and based solely on the fact that I'd used the same email address to register for each, it was a tremendous violation. Numerous other people felt similarly.
The three top stories on HN that day were about the forced merger. Two of them were links to my own posts on G+. The original links are of course now dead, though I archived nearly all my own posts at the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.
