gosh, that's a lot of work - good on them!

I've been out of the Usenet scene for ages, does it still require multiple providers and/or indexers to be viable?

This is weird. I tried Eweka like a year ago, when starting out with usenet and testing different providers / indexers. I'm not sure whether I was able to download even a single file - almost everything was failing due to missing articles. I ended up staying with Frugal Usenet where the missing articles were much less of a problem during my tests. What could be the reason considering the data here shows Eweka is just amazing?

For every selected segment, the test used the NNTP ARTICLE command to request the actual article body, rather than relying only on STAT or HEAD, which can report metadata even when the body is gone.

Fuck the providers who do this. This is a disruptive behaviour. The author should name and shame and the community shouldn't use those servers.