The comment area and development is at it's most basic now.
It is there, it works. Thats all that can be said about it.

Customising takes hours of inplementing function.php codes.
The most plugins I tried did not work for me.

I would love to see more options, and at first: the OFF button for sites that do not use the comment area. And not only "not visible at the front-end" but also blocking the function spammers use to inject comments that still show up in the admin. (At the moment I use the "disable all comments" plugin for that.)

As mentioned in this article, an ajax function would be great. No refreshing the page.

Ps: for spam use Akismet AND activate the api key!