I really don’t want to be the ass hole here, but this seems to be a specific issue in your company maybe.
We have dozens of users that are fine with the UI.
What I actually wanna say:
We’ll probably never reach a point in terms of UI were we will make every one happy.
For now you could use custom css for your reply buttons to be more fancy and noticable as they are now. Even though this is not update safe exactly, it could also help to cure your issues a bit.