Freenet has already thought of those problems you describe!
Usenet was fairly centralized, but Freenet works in a similar way to Bittorrents in that the more people that use it, the faster it goes. And it is totally decentralized so there are no costs other than your computer and internet connection, which you have already. You can configure how much bandwidth to allocate to Freenet, and it doesn't require excessive amounts.
And there are spam-resistant forums on Freenet. Instead of messages going to a central place, users publish their own messages to their own place, and other users pick them up from there. So if someone spams, you just don't bother picking up their messages. There is also a web of trust so spammers can be identified collaboratively rather than each person having to flag spammers separately. There are some extra tricks to speed it up and enable it to scale, but it seems to work pretty well in practice.
Freenet's old message forum (Frost) is spammable, but the new ones are called Freenet Message System (FMS) and Freetalk, and they are highly spam resistant.
Freenet is designed from the ground up to assume a minority of its users will be malicious, and takes steps to allow for that. Data flows around in encrypted chunks of 32kB and these could be small messages or large binaries. You really should try out Freenet, it covers all the objections you made.
The only real threat to Freenet is a legal one, of governments making it illegal or blocking its traffic. But even then it has a Darknet mode, where you only connect to trusted friends, and the UDP traffic is designed to be difficult to fingerprint. If it comes to it, the next step would be steganography, where Freenet traffic is disguised as some other form of traffic.