I do not really understand what you discuss about, and this in such an emotional manner. It started about "Reply to Mailing list", but now you even fight about the "Reply" and "Reply all" buttons. This is ridiculous, as it is well defined and leaves NO ROOM for interpretation.
http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5322#section-3.6.2
I repeat this in a short sentence each: Reply: You answer to "From" XOR "Reply-to", with Reply-to taking precedence. Reply all: Like reply, plus a copy to all (known) recipients of the original: To:, CC: (obviously not BCC:)
So the creator of this thread got it wrong. NO BUTTON replies to the To: field, if it is overridden by the Reply-to: This is the sole purpose of the Reply-to field.
If you answer to _this_ message, no matter how, I will receive my copy through the list, AND IN NO CASE directly! To do this, you had to add me to To: or CC: manually. This behaviour is WANTED by design of the RFC. ONLY IF I had put more addresses into the To or CC fields, you could make a difference with Reply or Reply all. Again this is WANTED by the RFC. To vary from this, would mean you create a mail client that violates RFC and works differently from ANY OTHER common sense program.
It also is common practice for mail list programs, to put their address into the "Reply-to" field. Since decades I used literally hundreds of mailing-lists, and they actually all work the same. So again, this is not in your hands, thus not worth to fight about.
Now let's have look at Reply-List. Because a "Reply to list" is NOT defined in a RFC, this is entirely up to the developers. They SHOULD just EXPLAIN what they really mean by it, so everybody KNOWS what happens beforehand. Everyone may make suggestions, this is an open world, though. And the developers will try to honour what they find feasible.
My 2 cents In all programs I know of - that even have this button, a modern fashion
- the Reply-List button honours the Reply-To field. Simple as that.
I do not see a difference to Reply, and I cannot even imagine what else it should do, so I would agree to those who say this button is simply dispensable... But again, this may be my ignorance. It is entirely up to the developers to define AND DOCUMENT its behaviour.
DOCUMENT your (mis-)feature properly, and everything is well. Close your ears to screaming and flaming.
BUT AGAIN: DO NOT FIGHT OVER REPLY AND REPLY TO ALL. It is well defined and done correctly by RC!
Cheers Hardy