A paragraph of text or less in list mode(dev.newsblur.com) should be just enough to get the gist of what information your feed has in it. It would be better so you can create proper spacing so when scrolling down articles everything has the exact spacing with a perfect flow.
I noticed that when I had a 3000 or so articles in my feeds when I scrolled sometimes a whole page of text would show and throw off my scrolling rhythm. Otherwise list mode is great and very close to the ‘compact’ mode of Google Reader.