You took the words out of my mouth! Complex, long-winded, multi-threaded discussions on Discourse are so unbearable IMHO that I was considering making such a proposal myself.
I think linear discussion formats are woefully ill-suited to this kind of exchanges, and this also applies to smaller, less consequential threads.
Let’s take the recent ‘Proposal to add top-level definitions (and replace package objects)’ thread, for example, which is not that big. Although I think I’ve read through almost all messages there as they were coming, looking at it now (for example to refresh my memory on what was discussed), it seems entirely impenetrable unless I am willing to spend (again!) a large amount of time skimming through the entire timeline of discussion. Discourse’s flaky lazy-loading of messages and highjacked search does not help.
And for someone who hasn’t read through it already, understanding what was discussed requires an enormous time and energy investment that I think not many are willing to undertake.
If this had been a reddit-like thread, I would have been able to very quickly (in O(log n) instead of O(n)) skim through it by following and collapsing logical threads of discussion. For example, see this reddit discussion of length similar to the Discourse one mentioned above.
Now, I’m not sure reddit is the best place to have these discussions. We could create a new “scala-contributors” subreddit with the same rules as this forum. But I think people often abuse downvoting on reddit (downvoting when they don’t agree instead of when the comment is not constructive), which means that slightly more popular opinions may appear way more popular than they really are — i.e., when every team is downvoting the other in addition to upvoting their own.