It would be a welcome improvement, but frankly, I have learned to live with the... well... peculiar way the perlmonks site works and don't mind it much anymore. Accepting literal line breaks in posts instead of br and p tags would be much higher on my ui priority list than better reply hide/show, as would dozens of other changes.
To be honest, some improvements in uptime and loading speeds would be even more welcome. Perlmonks is by far the slowest-loading website I have ever used, which is quite remarkable given that it's a text-only site with absolutely minuscule amounts of data per page. It also seems to be down a lot, too, but that impression may just be caused by loading times over a minute... after waiting 30 seconds or so for a text page to load, I tend to lose my patience and close the tab.

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