Yes I think we see this effect ourselves in feedback from customers — there’s a definite pull to make the interface more similar to social media because those are interfaces people are generally most familiar with now.
As much as I appreciate that you’re trying to make Discourse work, it’s not always the best fit for everyone.
The request for nested replies like reddit is specifically complicated, we’ve had requests for this before and have estimated internally that it could take months of work to implement in a stable way… and this doesn’t include the ongoing work we’re doing right now to modernize our topic layout (removing our proprietary widget system in favor of ember components).
To simplify, I might consider:
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Hiding embedded replies entirely… some people get confused and expect this to be threading when it’s not. It’s easy enough to hide the “N replies” buttons with CSS.
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Consider hiding the reply button in the timeline on the right of the topic content… this is meant to make it easy to “reply to topic” from anywhere in the post, but without knowing the difference between “reply to topic” and “reply to post” it might be added noise.
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Consider hiding some buttons at the bottom of every topic. There are some redundancies here, like bookmarks, flags, and shares (which are also present on every post).
Sorry this isn’t more helpful in regard to your specific questions — but there’s only so much that can be done at the moment without significant development time. Good luck!