Hello
There is only one thing why we don't use the threads feature. This is something what is a problem on topics too. Users generally reply the latest topic post / chat message without triggered the specific post/message reply button. Which breaks the thread.
On topics we might can fix this with removing the blue reply button on the bottom but in a chat channel we cannot do this.
Threads assume that all user use this feature right, but most of time on our community it isn't the case.
I am thinking now a thing where the threads works just like topics and the chat channels like categories. So users could create new threads in the selected channel. It would help more organize the channel conversations.
That's the idea for now... I am not sure, it's going to be a pretty big change compared how things works now.
Discuss this on our forum.