Did you know it takes roughly the same amount of time now as it did in 1940 to clean a house? Some things can be optimized, but not necessarily sped-up all around.

Two ways to show parent comments on the admin dashboard:

* https://wordpress.org/plugins/at-reply-two/ (mine)
* https://wordpress.org/plugins/show-parent-comment/ (Stephen Cronin's)

His uses JS, and mine uses html5 with a shim for fallback. Mine also has Twitter-style @-replies (it hijacks the reply link) so his is a more pure fix and mine just happens to fill my need.