I’ll start. Did you know you can run a headless version of JD2 on a raspberry pi? It’s not the greatest thing in the world, but sometimes its nice to throw a bunch of links in there and go to sleep.
I’ve personally found that usenet isn’t that good unless you’re trying to grab things immediately. I find trying to grab older stuff really hit or miss, mostly miss.
Use two providers on different networks. They can fill in the gaps for each other.