Top posting vs replying inline feels like an incomplete dichotomy. I often encounter threads on mailing lists where people are replying inline but not trimming the part they're not replying to. That makes it hard to follow. Or they reply inline and trim well but it's still hard to follow because you need more context than just the part they're replying to.
So the key is "the thread needs to be distilled" as OP puts it. And often that's more work than just finding the right sentence to quote.
My approach these days in my email is:
99% of the time I quote nothing and delete everything my client puts into the compose window, relying on the default thread-view in most email clients to supply the context for my readers.
1% of the time I need to quote, and I quote liberally, treating words as a wiki, and editing/sculpting the text in '> ' just as much as my own reply below it.
Yeah this is my strategy. The top/bottom post brigade are both happy and email clients seem to handle it well.
It's kind of alarming to me that the default in say gmail is to constantly re-send the original message chain back and forth. I guess it then gives the whole chain to newcomers to the thread?
Literally couldn't connect to my mobile phone, and after a lot of troubleshooting (which Unifi does pretty much nothing to help you with) I found that when the phone had roamed to the mesh'd AP, ARPs for it wouldn't get answered. If I forced it back to a wired AP or manually added it to the table... all worked fine. Went unfixed for years, heck, I still don't know if it is...
And all the "alerts" about malicious traffic that a bunch of prosumers seem to love? It's not very actionable for figuring out if it's really a problem nor digging deeper...
Oh, and when they had a firmware update that changed the SSID maximum length from 32 (the spec) to 31. My SSID is 32 characters and after that I could no longer edit the network without a UI error. That sucked.
I'm now on OPNsense and Ruckus APs and while it's not as integrated, I couldn't be happier.