It's been slow at work, and I found a new way to approach this project.

Under Settings > Thread Display, I've added an alternative viewing options for threads.Effectively, this viewing mode addresses the cumbersome "one post to read per mouse click" people have expressed frustration towards. Now when you click "into" a thread (that is, when not just browsing an item, or looking at the stream), you'll see the full contents of the thread, rather than just the post you clicked on.

For this mode, I've also added "inline" comments, such that you'll have to click on "reply" in order to reply to a specific post, as you'll no longer be viewing one post at a time. The comments box should appear below the post in question, and you should be able to preview and submit from this comment box as well. Currently, you can only work on one comment box at a time, and drafts are disabled for this particular view (though, if you click through to preview mode, it'll come back).

I had to do some pretty drastic changes to the idkfa backend to get this going, and I'm not super confident that it didn't break things for either classic or the "firehose" view. I've done testing in a few browsers, but please let me know if you find something strange.