A pity indeed, but probably an attempt to cut the volume of the list. The idea is probably that you have to make an extra effort to send a mesage to the whole list, and hence make your message relevant to everyone reading it.
Given that the vast majority of replies (at least from me) are intended for the list, this means far more messages require an address change, than not. This also means that sometimes people get two replies, because I occasionally forget to change the address before sending it, thus requiring a resend to the list. ~~~~~~~ I concur. Editing the "Reply To" address is a pain. It would be better if the "Reply To" went to the list. If I want to send to the originator, I'll modify the reply. Just my two cents. James