No, top posting won because of Outlook (and to a lesser extent due to web clients). The main evidence for this is that where I work (and surely in other places

No, top posting won because of Outlook (and to a lesser extent due to web clients). The main evidence for this is that where I work (and surely in other places well), people who use Outlook end up re-inventing inline quoting, badly. They write their answers inline and use coloring to distinguish them because Outlook has no proper quoting support. And the reason is quite simple: if each mail in a thread is only a small number of sentences, then top posting is fine. However, when you're trying to do serious technical work via email, replying to specific points is necessary. Inline quoting is simply the best way of clearly indicating which part of the original email you're replying to.