That is what I was afraid of. It did not make any sense to me why one would advertise to the HN crowd that even though the mail client may not provide the best

That is what I was afraid of. It did not make any sense to me why one would advertise to the HN crowd that even though the mail client may not provide the best threaded message display at least it does not provide the worst case scenario of flat sorted by date emails. I really wanted to like mailpile, but the email threading is terrible for serious use with mailing lists.