> Your comments make me think the crux of the problem is that people want tickets to be like email and use email to manage them. I'm not sure you can ever overcome the "chronological pile-up" problem if you allow email as a user interface to ticketing.

I agree that's partly it, but that seems ok when you're in the thick of discussing a problem/fix. If you're doing a code review or something after a fix has been pushed, you actually want certain messages to stand out to describe resolutions and whatnot.

So like gmail where you can star/mark certain replies as important and those messages would show up at top-level in the ticket, where all other messages are collapsed.