I agree that the UX does a good job of hiding some functions away. I didn’t know this option existed and had never thought to click on the button that leads to it because I assumed the button was just decoration.
However, I think this comes down to people understanding the Discourse culture rather than just having the option made very obvious. I’ll admit that my forum only migrated to Discourse this year after over 20 years of using less fully featured software, but I have difficulty getting a lot of my user’s thought processes past…
I have a question I’d like an answer to.
Should I use a general search engine? No!
Should I use the forum search function to find the answer that’s been given the last 20 times this question has been asked? No!
Will I look in the specific category where questions like mine would be asked? No!
I’ll create a new topic.
Will I look at the popup “Your topic looks like one of these older topics perhaps you could look at them instead?” No!
I’ll create my new topic…in a general discussion category rather that the specific category that’s designed for questions like mine.
The subtlety of a create linked reply option would be lost on them!