>And no one has (as of 1133 EST 17-Feb-2022) provided a real answer for why HN has such an obvious feature missing :)
This kind of reply is exactly the reason I'm glad that HN does not have reply notifications. At least a dozen people have clearly explained that they prefer HN without reply notifications, but you're here offering a troll-ish claim of "no real answer" with a correspondingly sarcastic emoticon.
If HN functioned like a normal internet forum, ie it had reply notifications, then if/when someone actually posted why HN has intentionally decided to break the pattern would've popped up as something findable
It's the same reason dang needs to manually tell people about 'more' in long threads, or repost previous discussion of the same topic. That was the initial design and no one wants to make new changes because of an absurd idealization of that design.
No one wants to rethink old decisions made a long time ago and genuinely wonder if things need to change. Hence people come up with bullshit defences.
'more' links for long threads wasn't HN's initial design. It's a performance workaround and therefore bs in its own right. I'm slowly making progress on a reimplementation of Arc, which will hopefully allow this to go away.
And no one has (as of 1133 EST 17-Feb-2022) provided a real answer for why HN has such an obvious feature missing :)