In reply to Gabriel.

Agreed. I also work for many small businesses, small non-profits, and solopreneurs. For them, the comment system is basically a trap. They don't know how much they're taking on by having comments open on their site.

It takes either plenty of traffic or an existing engaged community to produce even a few genuine comments. People who have that are generally putting significant effort into their site and are much more able to turn the feature on or add plugins.

Granted, I also run a blog with lots of comments, and we use the built-in features pretty heavily. If they were turned off by default, they would probably be even less supported than they are now. Still, maybe robust third party services are simply a better match for this usage.