RSS not appearing in meta tag
I had a similar issue before. As you mentioned, feed auto-discovery works through the link in the  tag (see http://diveintohtml5.info/semantics.html#rel-alternate for more info).

I found that some themes and modules add it in automatically, while others don't. If yours is absent, you can auto-discover the default drupal RSS feed by adding the following to a preprocess function:

$element = array(
  '#tag' =&gt; 'link', 
  '#attributes' =&gt; array( 
    'href' =&gt; '/rss.xml', 
    'rel' =&gt; 'alternate',
  ),
);
drupal_add_html_head($element, 'mymodule');


Alternatively, you could just add it into the html.tpl.php file, as mentioned in this post: http://www.webbykat.com/2012/03/adding-feedburner-rss-link-your-theme-drupal-7-omega

Regarding Views, I have found that enabling auto discovery means adding a "Feed" display then turning on the setting at Feed Settings &gt; Attach To &gt; Master, as you did. You can also set it to include other displays to get the RSS icon to display in those views.