Hi everyone!
I wanted to give my option about how to solve the problems. I think the problem is in code instead of in people. :)
Making comments rating system to AppDB would be useful. Simple idea to make this happen would be add a rate up button for all users (even guests). select X highest rated comments and sort them by thread and date. Then also add automatic system that removes points from comments based on how old they are. I don't have any good number for this now but feeling is that for high traffic applications something like a point per week might work while low traffic apps should have a point every 3 months. Also give maintainer/logged in users option to reduce rating for some comments. But still it should be possible to browse all old comments if some user really wants to do it. (So something like /. style comment system with few tweaks)
Have fun fighting ;)