Reply at the top or reply at the bottom?

[David Carlson]

I do not have an answer to this question, so I am asking for others' views.

Long ago (before GMail) it was pretty standard to reply to emails at the
bottom and various email clients like Thunderbird handled threads very
well, allowing readers to read messages in chronological order.

Now, in GMail, which has an annoying habit of 'hiding' all the text below
the first white space, a reply at the bottom may not even be visible when
reading a 'new' reply.

To make matters worse, the Android email client sorts in reverse
chronological order so the newest is at the top, but if replies are at the
bottom, it eventually becomes impossible to decipher what order messages
were posted in.

If some posters take the time to clip the history out of replies, the
context gets lost so overly simple replies like "Yes" or "No" become
meaningless.

Based on this, is there (1) an email client that keeps all this straight
and (2) has the preferred placement for replies changed?

David C