You might be interested to hear that not everyone feels that way.

In fact, the lack of what I considered an acceptable client is what made me stop reading Usenet. I was running Linux at the time, and I thought all of nn, tin, rn, trn and slrn had very bad user interfaces. (I forget if Pine had a Usenet reader in it. If it did, I tried it, too. I also tried the Usenet reader in Lynx, and in fact that is what I was using when I gave up on Usenet. Lynx's user interface bothered me a lot less than the others, but Lynx had severe performance problems when I "pointed it at" a busy newsgroup.)

The user interfaces of all the clients I just mentioned are text-mode, but that is not the main reason I stopped using them: I continued to use Lynx as my web browser and text-mode Emacs as my editor for many years after giving up on Usenet.

trn is the client I spent the most time with. Probably the biggest problem I had with it is that is discouraged contemplative reading. Specifically, every other device or contrivance for reading I have used allowed me to go back and re-read what I was reading a few minutes ago. In trn, I could usually succeed in going back (using the = key or using the arrow keys combined with the "tree view") but some small but significant fraction of the time going back was impossible (or prohibitively difficult and tedious) because in the mean time I had reached the end of the unread articles in one group and had been automatically taken to the next group with unread articles or (if I remember correctly) I had finished up reading a huge subtree and been taken automatically to some other subtree.

My second big problem with trn was that it tempted you to get a "stupid high" by using it to overload your brain with a constant stream of information or novelty in much the same way that watching TV does.

Although some probably considered that a feature, I concluded that it was unhealthy.

The main contributor to this "dynamic" was the decision by the designer of trn that all a user would have to do was keep on hitting the space bar (or more realistically the space bar and the n key, which skips to the start of the next article) and he would continue to be fed new text. In contrast, browsing the web requires a person to make a steady stream of decisions about what to see next, and although these decisions seems very easy to make, this constant stream of decision points seems to prevent the use of the web to get the "stupid" high that certain people like myself were tempted to get whenever we used trn to read Usenet.

If I remember correctly, slrn shares the two problems I just described with trn.

I do realize that many people feel as you do about these text-mode Usenet clients that came out of the Unix tradition. I also realize that Usenet had certain "pro-social" and "pro-free-speech" properties that the web does not have. Also, note that I spent many thousands of hours reading Usenet, back when it was still a more important medium for online discussions than the web was.