The input box that is shown by default and the bottom-most reply link have the exact same effect. If you click the bottom-most reply link, it just focuses/expands that input box.

@Mattflaschen: Oh. Thanks for pointing that out. Then I guess my real complaint is that there is literally no way to reply to the last comment on the page. The current UI allows replying specifically to any OTHER comment on the page, but not the last one.

Is that accurate?

@Mattflaschen: It seems that T92400 was implemented, despite being counter-intuitive. To make sure we're saying the same thing, if there is:

Topic

• Reply A

then hitting reply for "Reply A" will (currently) create this:

Topic

• Reply A
• My new reply

But what I really wanted, and what I would think most users would expect, was this:

Topic

• Reply A
  • My new reply

As far as I can tell, there is no way to create a new reply nested inside Reply A. According to T92400, that is intentional, although I don't see any explanation for why it would be desired. The current behavior seems counter-intuitive, and it is quite frustrating that there is literally no way to accomplish something that seems entirely sensible.

This has been discussed a lot, so I merged this into an older bug.

This was a deliberate product change (led by Danny), and all of the behavior is by-design.

I don't know of any plans to revisit it. It's not impossible to change our mind on this, but we have a lot of other things on our roadmap (also, we only have a part-time on-loan PM right now).

Thanks @Mattflaschen. The ticket you merged this with explains the situation much better than the other ticket(s). While I might agree or disagree with the philosophy, at least now I understand it, and can live with it. For anyone looking at this who doesn't want to click over there, the summary that helped me was when @DannyH wrote:

The core idea is that you should be able to follow the general flow of conversation down the left side of the thread, and most simple conversations between two or three people will look flat. The indentation is a special feature that happens when somebody goes back in the chronology and creates a tangent based on an earlier post, instead of following the conversational flow.

"Mattflaschen closed this task as a duplicate of T93883: ..." - that page is not specifically about impossibility to reply to latest comment, but one example, of bug report author, @He7d3r , maybe, also/partially says about that: "This was a reply to Leonardo, not to the IP itself: https://pt.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=T%C3%B3pico:Sghi15zkgzpkazhj&topic_showPostId=sghjjxakzxss4ydh#flow-post-sghjjxakzxss4ydh".

i know bug reports and feature requests exactly about replying to last comment: earliest is T94381 , it has another 2 duplicates T102650 , T95084 , and, this.