Are their Any ftp Solutions for Grabbing Binaries in an nntp?

[Hart Larry]

In an ideal World, it would seem that I should be able to run an ncftp style 
client to list-and-grab binaries of an nntp server. Sure, I understand there are 
several Linux clients where you practicly must know exact article numbers, such 
as aub, lottanzb, papercut, newslight, sinntp, nntp-pull, and nget. For myself, 
as I am rather 
comfortable with trn4 and Pine for dealing with Usenet, these other solutions 
seem complicated.
I suppose if we could really get Leafnode configured with trn4, then maybe I 
could load larger groups. One of our LUG members, who I convinced to join this 
list, wondered if "curl" would do the trick? But looking in its manual, I see 
nothing about news, usenet, or nntp.
I have many times looked in the Debian repo, but seemingly the better more 
robust clients are made for graphical settings, including windows.
Aside from an amount of large articles, trn has many troubles with quite high 
article numbers, so whats a grabber to do?
Now, yes, occasionally I use an Easynews web solution, but Giganews has a larger 
archive, but only nntp--and-they know seemingly little about Linux solutions 
which work well with speech.
Thanks so much in advance of any solutions.
Hart