Perhaps first level replies in the Seekers of Perl Wisdom section could prepend "Ans: " as a default instead? If it's not an answer, the burden would be on the user to change it, though.

I'm not very familiar with the inner workings of the Everything2 engine but is it possible to have it strip out the (user) denoter such as s/^\s*\($in_reply_to_user\)\s*// before the Re: is prepended? People aren't likely to manually retype (tye) into a post title, are they?