Huge annoyance. It got much worse with an update I received about a months ago. The quoted text is by default collapsed so when you want to reply quickly to someone, you won't even notice you're top-posting.
I tried to contact support or fill some feedback form to no avail. I eventually gave up.
Anyway, this is how web apps ride (no a single day passes without me ranting about the current trend, which I find alarming).
What's wrong with top-posting? (I've using email since the 90s, and at some point I realized I only disliked top-posting because of its cultural significance--I now prefer it for its functional advantages.)
There's no big difference if the quoted part is small enough and you're replying in one go (although I'd argue that even there it breaks the historic flow of the conversation).
It is a big of a hassle if you want to reply to parts of the original post, Usenet-style (y'know, before "Usenet" meant "less traceable file sharing"). There having the answer atop of each single paragraph you're responding to is seriously weird, it's like playing Jeopardy with email.
Never mind that breaking up quoted text into parts is pretty buggy with gmail, due to the absence of quote chars (replaced by those colored bars).
A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?
=======
As ever, there are exceptions, with one-on-one, serial email being the most prevalent. But if there's more than one recipient, top-posting is godawfully confusing.
Seriously... even if they feel they need to do top-posting by default to satisfy the drooling masses trained on outlook, maybe they could use this "selected text" feature as an indication the user is more careful about their reply quoting, and position the cursor below the quotation in that case...
