Technically all posts are comments but what we call "posts" are comments without a parent author. Also funny enough the parent permlink field in a post creation transaction on the blockchain is hijacked to be used as the root tag which in my opinion is a little dirty. For the uninitiated here is a root post transaction and here is a comment on it.

The observation is to say that we already have quite a bit of by-convention interpretation done by frontends, with the precedent set by steemit.com. At this point new frontends and dApps need to just deal with this.

So I totally agree with preserving backwards (or sideways?) compatibility. If we think of Steem social media posts as the basic container format, with expectations of some level of social offering, legibility and so on, then dApps need to extend that format, not substitute it.

How to do that though is going to be a challenge to dApp operators but it should be something they are up to to make a successful dApp. You are just reading the writing on the wall here - dApps that don't recognize what you've said end up annoying the vast number of their users, and their non-users but those other Steem users they need to take into account.

Idea for a next post: how dApp owners can actually solve some these issues.