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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.
I have to chuckle at "the nicest news readers had an extremely well-designed interface". Which news readers do you mean? I mostly used trn and the newsreader in lynx, though I tried slrn, tin, rn, pine, the newsreader in Netscape Communicator and IIRC a text-mode client named nn (but not Emacs GNUS, which I did not have the hardware resources to run). When I stopped using trn, I promised myself I would never again use software with a user interface as badly designed as trn's user interface.
ADDED. My low opinion of trn's user interface does not come from a general dislike of text-mode interfaces. I was a happy user of text-mode emacs and Unix shells for 18 years for example. ADDED. The client-server architecture and general design of the whole newsgroups infrastructure was in contrast well designed, IMHO.
ADDED. And yes, I did make use of the tree diagram in the upper-right corner when using trn.
My preferred usenet reader was slrn, though GNUS was acceptable.
The textmode interfaces were not pretty, but they could be extremely usable. This is not the same as easy to learn to use effectively. But common things were quick. I have never found anything that was as good at selectively browsing large amounts of constantly updating text as slrn. The closest would probably be gmail. gmail encourages you to archive everything, making it no longer visible. slrn autohides every article as you read it. Both make it easy to rewalk the tree of conversation as new messeages arrive.
Speaking of which, LW used to publish an RSS feed for each "post" or "top-level submission," which makes it easy to use an RSS reader to rewalk the tree of comments under that post in basically the same way.
ADDED. A better "place" for me to have "put" this comment would have been as a reply to this feature request though that feature request and the ensuing discussion suggest that people would prefer to use an interface like lesswrong.com/comments/ instead of an RSS reader to meet the need expressed in the feature request.