Personally, I want to see Usenet come back. The idea of pulling down content and reading them later offline appeals to me.
I agree. Though our perception of usenet from the compuserve era is probably tinted by nostalgic fondness.
Once the internet took off - as I recall - usenet started to become a cesspool of trolls and advertisements.
That's when it become obvious that a lot of what made Usenet work so well was that the population was small and very homogenous (making it easy to build a high-trust culture), and that neither of those were staying true.
I can confirm. I'm still active there, however when USENET was created they couldn't know that when Internet entered in every house, the worst individuals would access it and very predictably abuse/exploit it. As of today I see no way it can be brought back without some serious technical modifications to keep trolls/shills/abusers away.
With hindsight, it turns out people have more of an influence on a medium than the medium does on the people.
[1] for memory: when nearly everyone on USENET was highly geeky and it was aggressively non-commercial, the former due to barriers to access and the latter due to trying to stay under the radar of the organisations which were footing the long-distance bills.
(one of the best discussion media I'm on is pre-USENET, or nearly so. Unfortunately it has no ouija gateway, so it's been losing members to organic attrition: cancer, heart disease, etc., more rapidly than the epigonoi have been adopting.)
But, Gopher is growing again, and unlike Usenet, there is no (minimal..) noise, only signal.