It doesn’t really matter, as the “misuse” is of no consequence, whether …
- they reply to the topic
- they reply to the first post
In both cases the OP gets notified in exactly the same way, nothing even mildly wrong happens.
If you are arguing in favor of visually suppressing the “in reply to” when someone replies to the first post, I don’t oppose that.
I should also point out that reply being at the bottom is kind of intentional, we want people to actually read the whole topic (in a perfect world…) before replying. If they see some specific text in a specific post they just gotta reply to before reading everything and reaching the end, that is fine. That’s why the composer does not interrupt your reading, too.
