This is actually a great example of what I am referring to. It seems that when you quote the OP, it ends up being a post reply instead of a topic reply.
You are correct but as demonstrated above, there are still ways (seemingly) to create a post reply using quotes (maybe that’s the only way?).
This might be able to help, I will play around with this plugin, thank you! My use case is that I am looking to position topic replies as “on-topic” and post replies as “off-topic” where I will hide post replies from the topic thread and keep them nested under the post. With this structure, quoting the OP in a response is inherently “on-topic” and should not be nested. With my ideal design, the screenshot above would not be able to happen. I hope that makes sense?