I believe you guys, it’s just that our users are used like this and it’ll take a bit of effort to get there… but it’s doable.
Related to this, I was just reading @codinghorror post Natural breakpoints or "chapters" for long topics? and thought that this kind of table of contents but for topics only would be a nice solution to be able to gather and have visible a sequence of topics while browsing and replying only in a single one.