Yeah, the issue I think with NNTP and with mailman, hyperkitty, etc. is there appears to be a lack of innovation, development - and when it does happen, it happens at a snails pace.  Maybe I'm wrong, but that certainly appears to be the case from what I saw reading through feature requests, etc.  Technologies like Discourse, etc. have a more active development community and the popularity of older technogies is decreasing.  No, I don't believe mail or usenet is going away anytime soon, but the feature set is going to remain pretty static - with the new feature sets going to things like Discourse.  I did search on knode and found that development was discontinued - and there isn't really a plethora of nntp clients available - as there was decades ago.  People generally have moved on.