In reply to Steve Wilkinson.

Steve, as I pointed out above, for seven years we've maintained and supported Thoughtful Comments which handles everything except email notifications (try Comments Plus for that) all within the native comment format.

We've proposed Thoughtful Comments as a feature plugin to improve core comments and (been completely ignored by core, core is an insiders' insiders club). From my perspective, there is a total lack of will insider WordPress core to improve many important features while getting lost on emojis and oembed.

Core functionality which urgently requires upgrading:

* security (WordPress should be easily secured out of the box without requiring additional plugins)
* performance (this partially means caching: the core caching framework should be built-in with additional caching functionality built into plugins
* comments (I agree with you the current state of commenting performance and functionality is lamentable: enough so to dedicate years of my life to upgrading that functionality ourselves)

Your demand that a solution needs to be perfect before it's viable really takes the wind out of development sails.

* Postmatic is great if you want to replace a third party service with another third party service.
* wpDisquz (we donated a couple of hundred dollars to them at one point) is great if you can handle the performance hit and a very complex interface.
* Thoughtful Comments is great if you just want better comment moderation and performance using native comments.

Many solid solutions are already out there.