Any chance of this working without nested comments?

Not at this time.

When you’re not using threaded comments, WP doesn’t have a ‘reply’ link so there isn’t an easy way to recreate that without a lot of overhead.

Thanks for the answer!

I was using @reply which somehow does this because we are running it on our production site and it works without threaded comments being on.

See https://www.balloon-juice.com/2016/02/24/good-news-everybody-32/

But for reasons beyond me, it doesn’t when we use WpDiscuz (which like yours, does require threaded comments), so I had hoped yours would be my savior since it’s been updated much more recently!

Oh well, thanks again for the response.

If WpDiscuz requires threaded comments, what’s not working? Or did you mean it requires non-threaded?

Sorry to confuse!

WpDiscuz also requires threaded comments for their reply to work but since the site owner and users emphatically don’t want threaded, I’m trying to take advantage of WpDiscuz’s other capabilities while preserving the non-threaded comments with a reply function.

Ahhh. Okay. I understand.

Part of why I forked AtReply was because of how janky the reply when there wasn’t threaded comments. :/