The benefits of usenet are

-1700+ days of retention
-you don't have to seed,upload or worry about ratio
-awesome for filling requests on torrent sites
-even a download that's 4 years old can be downloaded at 100mbit
-has almost everything ever released including rare releases

The bad
- you need a good index site such as nzbs.org, dognzb, nzb.su (nzbs.org is free but getting on there is near impossible, nzb.su cost 10usd a year for VIP, unsure about dognzb)
- cost about 95usd a year for usenet server access or 10usd a month unlimited at usenetserver.com