@littke this is my last one for a bit…
I will do my “daily meta catch up” a few times over the next week on my iPad + Keyboard and see if there are any other big changes we need.
Overall the lesson learned here is very much what the commits say.
Over the years we carried a lot of exotic workarounds due to Safari on iOS quirks that happen if you are using a virtual keyboard.
The switch core carries now is
- You tell us you have a physical keyboard
- We disable a bunch of hacks that we had in place
So, long story short, we now can (and do) apply focus to titles and textarea when you start a new reply.
This feature request has gotten quite big and has run in 100 directions… I am closing it for now, let’s do a new topic to discuss any new quirks we discover. But 
with me and maybe wait 1-2 weeks living with the current patches prior to doing new specific iPad + Keyboard quirks topics.