I was most certainly not screwing with you. I admit though that the tone of my message was joyful.
But I sympathize with you; I recently subscribed to the bioperl mailing list and it's just as you said. Conversations and topics are hard to follow, and there's no quick way to reply to someone (at least not for me). At first I thought that it was me that wasn't able to set up my filters properly, but reading your post made me realize that it actually IS less convenient than a regular forum for other people as well.