Having figured it out myself, I agree. And it's not obvious that you need both a Usenet _indexer_ (who tells you what content is available) and a Usenet provider (who actually serves you the content).

FWIW, and I'm not sure if this is against terms here, but I use newsgeek for the former and giganews for the latter. Both are paid services but reasonably priced imo. When I can find something on Usenet, it typically downloads with speeds > 10MBps vs. torrenting which can exceed that but is usually much slower.

You can use whatever client you want. I have the *arr stack mentioned elsewhere in this thread as well and SABnzbd is the recommended option there.

Usenet + the *arr stack + Plex or Jellyfin make it completely effortless to watch any movie or TV show I can think of.

And I don't have to play the 'which service has this?' game.

RCS is, effectively, Google only.

And there is one singular app which supports RCS.

In many ways, it's a regression from SMS. In that SMS is somewhat universal, and RCS is so specialized it's almost worthless.

It had the potential to be a great replacement if it just worked™ like SMS/MMS (well, MMS was also quite fickle back in the days), given it's so brittle across devices even on the same OS, with little means of troubleshooting by end-users and even less from non-tech savvy users, it's kinda dead in the water.