Slightly off-topic, but why on the "Notes & Replies" section (for Amethyst and others) do we have to see the replies instead of just the root note and an indicator that your follow has replied N times in that thread? It's a weird UX to me having to click through replies without context.

It's usually because the Reply part (named conversations) on Amethyst is used to see what your follows are doing. So, everything they do show up there. If they are participating in a stream, it shows the stream and their message, for instance.

But why would you want it to be unencrypted when you can just as easily send an encrypted message

Because an encrypted message requires the recipient using a chat client, which very, very few do and most clients will never implement encryptions.