I’ve gone back and noticed that sometimes a handful of people had responded to a previous comment and I never realized it.
As it stands, it seems you only get notifications if people actually manually mention your username. Is there any method to get post/thread reply notifications?
I think you’ve got it, replies-to-replies is probably not needed (though if you don’t get many replies or if a reply actually is relevant to you it might still be beneficial to be on).