I am always willing to admit when I'm wrong. I was just railing on a site for not providing <author> information in their RSS feed. I'm used to pulling the author name using the <author> tag.
I come to learn that <author> tag is just meant for the post author's email address. <dc:creator> is truly meant for the name of the author.
I didn't know this. I had to Google it and I came up with this post explaining
RSS: <author> vs: <dc:creator>.