I'm one of the people who mentioned you, and I did it because you encouraged use of mentions, and it was a nuisance. It had a shallow learning curve, and it doesn't take long, but it's an extra step that's easy to forget and shouldn't be required. You are absolutely correct that it doesn't work as a replacement for quote notifications.

"Here's an idea, let's remove a functional feature and require the entire user base that contributes to the forum to learn a new, manual procedure when posting. And by the way, that user base also needs to learn a different manual procedure to see if anyone else has learned the first procedure."