I did not mean to say that the software existed in a perfect form, only that the design and separation of concerns exhibited by Usenet was exactly what was needed, and that the nicest news readers had an extremely well-designed interface -- exactly as useable as Thomas's wishlist.

A straight NNTP frontend would be quite nice -- it solves the reading, tree-navigating, and catchup problems. What it leaves unsolved is voting, private messages, and drafts. Of these, I only see the first as critical.

Of the ways to get such a separation of concerns, publishing the database via NNTP seems the easiest to me. It's still nowhere near a trivial "plug these two pieces of code together", of course. I'm not familiar enough with the reddit codebase to know how well it maps to NNTP, and how long it would take. My rough estimate would be a month or two to get something useable from a programmer working full time.

Then we have to figure out how to do voting, which means (a) defining an extension to the NNTP protocol, (b), implementing it on the server, and (c) patching a few clients to use it. This I'd expect to take on the order of a week or two, if everything else was working.