In reply to Seth.

So my example failed, but the point I was trying to convey is that fundamental features that are core to a blog & cms are bound to stay in core. And that's a good thing. Referring to a famous author with a commentless blog as an example meant to make commenting look like an optional side-attraction misses the point, imo. Hell, Godin's blog isn't really a full on blog because it doesn't have commenting. It's a one-way marketing channel. WordPress' job is not to make the lives more convenient for marketers, it's more interested in democratizing the web and giving people voices, readers included. Especially when said marketers can just turn off the features they don't want with the click of a button.

People were in an uproar because they took out the ability to manually add borders to images and that's something <1% of the userbase uses. Imagine what it would be like if you had to send them to a 3rd party plugin not controlled by the WordPress community for something as primal as comments.

In my mind, if people are having a bad time with comments, the comments feature needs more love and more development, not less.