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 th

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).