Just a few comments on BNR:

Just switching to a different news reader isn't a realistic option for many BNR users. Actually, BNR is quite different than most news readers in that it can't even post. But what it does do it does extremely well (when it's not corrupting it's own database ). It can make complete binary files by getting segments from multiple news groups and/or from multiple different news servers. I don't know of another news reader that is as useful for downloading binary files.

IMHO, it would be nice to have BNR2 "klickable". Failing that, a live CD with BNR2 installed on it would be very nice.

I doubt that we'll see BNR "in Debian" any time soon. It is buggy. The sources have only relatively recently been made public and it's not open source. It's also written in Delphi and I don't believe it can be compiled with any open source tools.