Data point 1: Thunderbird is the most popular desktop application in the world for reading newsgroups.
Data point 2: The core Thunderbird team do not see news support as a priority (and, IMO, they are right, given their goals).
Question: Can we find some of those Thunderbird news users and get them working on Thunderbird’s NNTP support?
The main thing I’d like to see, beyond polish and a few bug fixes, is support for automatic news message downloads. For example, TB would go out every 30 minutes and download all new messages in the groups I regularly read, so I don’t have to wait as I click on each message, or remember to perform a manual/offline download.