I agree that our change, while a fine general improvement, didn’t really answer.. well.. anything you wrote above 
I think the reality is that linking to previous replies in the same topic just isn’t that common of an activity in Discourse. Linking to the first post is a bit more common – and I do that by right clicking the topic title and selecting copy.
What you might want is the “jump to any numeric post or arbitrary date” keyboard shortcut which is #. To learn the full list of keyboard shortcuts, press ?.
(That is, if you didn’t know this already, clicking or tapping on the topic title will take you to the first post in the topic. Bask in the glory of this protip. 
)