Going back to the original topic (yes, this post is not a reply to the previous post), there are generally two different ways to post in a topic, and these are:
- Reply to the topic itself (aka “new comment”)
- Reply to another post inside of the topic (aka “reply”)
Depending on the nature of the topic, one would either more likely do the first or the second thing. In this topic for example you mostly made “replies”, but in some blog post (e.g. on @codinghorror’s) people would be more inclined to comment on the initial post.
Now, one could default one’s discouse distribution to either always show a “in reply to topic” text when a new comment was posted (which would likely be the better option for this dist) or to not suppress adjacent reply links.
The problematic thing is that in a forum there might be both of these and thus a fraction of topics would have more “unnecessary noise” just because of its nature. Switching between the two modes, for example if there are significantly more replys of the other kind, on the same discourse install is not an option (and could arguably be confusing for different installs altogether too).