As I skimmed consciousness this morning a vision came to me... "Sam... it's really this easy to do inline replies..." After a couple hours of brow-furrowing work I have managed to get inline response forms working.
Basically, when you hit the reply link on an existing comment, a reply form will magically materialize from the ether. This would seem a lot better than taking you to an entirely new page with no context as to what you are replying to.