Pinning a specific reply to the top reply section

You would need to customize the Forum - Thread widget to do this.  You could modify it to only show verified answers as best.

Good to know that it's possible. Would you have any guidance on where I should start editing? Sorry for what's probably a basic question. I'm brand new at manipulating/creating widgets. 

The changes would need to occurr in the common-rendered-best.vm file.  You'd likley want to change it to use $core_v2_forumReply List method instead of the ListThreaded method to be able to filter replies by ThreadId and ForumReplyQueryType.  This will allow you to retrieve only verified answers or only suggested answers for the specified thread. 

Of course other changes would need to made as well since you would no longer care about hasBestRepliesOverThreshod and quality vote counts

For general how to's when working with widgets, see the following documentation:
https://community.telligent.com/community/10/w/developer-training/53187/widgets

The widget can also be configured without changing any code to increase the best page size to up to 10.  This may be a simpler option that will still improve your experience.

Thank you very much! This is very helpful. 

Changing the list to a higher number is currently functioning as a workaround, but we wanted a more elegant solution long-term. 

Thank you again for the guidance.