I think when the centralized owner of a site has decided to fuck up the site in a way that pisses off a lot of users, it's reasonable to look to solutions which are resilient against that. If a particular Usenet peer decided it wanted to stop carrying comp.*, well, there were plenty of servers that did have it. If a peer went offline, the posts it originated were still out there, by nature of the protocol (well, up until everybody had decided to expire them, but archives also exist...)
