So for those of you following along, I'm wondering how people would prefer to use the forums.

So there's basically three browse modes (Nested, Hybrid, Linear). In order to let Nested and Hybrid make sense in the future, we'd have to force Linear and Nested users to hit a button to enable quickreply.

That may have been the way it was in the past, too, but this isn't about the past, it's about the future.