Mm. Well, the info is there in RAT. It would certainly be nice if places like The Monastery Gates could show both direct and total reply counts. Unfortunately, the way the code is "factored", this would be a significantly non-trivial change. It wouldn't be, except that any refactoring of code is non-trivial, disruptive, and risky. Sure, it could be done. Would it be worth it?

"Groklaw is the open-source mentality applied to legal research" ~ Linus Torvalds

The Open Voting Consortium is the open-source mentality applied to voting systems.