Yeah, automation only works if all the prerequisites are met. When you step outside the box, you have to learn how to do this kind of stuff manually. It's not really that difficult, just have to step through each bit and follow it back to determine where the values came from, and override with your specific values.
IMHO it's pointless to push usenet through a vpn if the connection is already encrypted. The usenet provider knows who you are, the ISP can see the amount of traffic but can't see the content, which is the same situation with any encrypted traffic. The only reason vpn is useful for torrents is anybody in the torrent group can see everyone else's IP as well as the content. Remove the knowledge of the content with the SSL pipe to the usenet provider, and there is no quick way to analyze you like there is with torrents.