Definitely - when combined with enabling incoming email prefer html, inline responding now works pretty well! 
It’s not perfect, but good enough for the time being. We’ve got a few other priorities at the moment, but getting rid of that pesky additional metadata (through a plugin, as discussed above) is still on our roadmap.
Is this still on your list @LeoMcA?
Somewhere, way way way down on the list. I’m not gonna get to it anytime soon, so if someone else wants to work on it there’s no danger of duplicated work.
I found I that putting this in the email css worked to hide the metadata in my limited testing:
table:first-of-type {
display:none;
}
Suppressing the button styling on the ‘Visit Topic’ link is not a problem I’ve found a solution for. It’s frustrating to have zero control over the formatting of the footer.