I prefer to consume mailing lists via Gmane's NNTP gateway: http://gmane.org/

It's a surprisingly nice experience. You can really easily pull archives, nntp clients tend to handle threading well, etc.

Sure: I use NNTP for my RSS/Atom feeds and my mailing lists, using the excellent gateways at http://gmane.org/ and http://gwene.org/

I use NNTP to follow a handful of development mailing lists via gmane.org.

Yes! There's a healthy community at comp.misc where we post stuff like this article, and sci.misc where we post non comp stuff. In fact you'll see a healthy correlation between articles posted to Ycombinator that are subsequently posted and discussed on comp.misc and now sci.misc. Good place to get a free Usenet account is Solani.org now that Albasani and AIOE are somewhat over-subscribed.

D development forums are NNTP, although there is a forum as well.

I really prefer the keyboard navigation and all the niceties offered by Thunderbird than the web groups interface, each with its own set of allowed actions, mostly without keyboard navigation.