Unfortunately, it was broken with the gmail redesign and is still broken. I open a thread with 30 new messages, select part of a message half way down, hit 'r', and find myself editing a reply to the very last message. Instead, I have to click an extra time to change the focus to the message (with no visual indication) before selecting it. Selecting text from a message should be sufficient indication to reply to that message, without needing to reposition the invisible focus. This bug costs me minutes per day.