I appreciate your elaboration and reference to the guidelines, but I think your application of them here is dubious.
>There are two main ways to do that. The first is to include more information in your comment—in this case you could have spelled out your argument more clearly and relied less on one-liners. The second is to use neutral and factual language. For example, you could have macroexpanded the nearly-informationless "better" into an explanation of just what the relevant difference is.
Sometimes greater detail is warranted, yes, but elaborating that way wouldn't have added relevant or decisive information. "Better" was already implicit from the previous post (enabling residents to get to destinations without a car); and the greater ease of such living in Europe, in more locations, is already undisputed. No one contested that point except to note that there still exist car-necessary rural areas in both places, which is exactly how they would have replied if I had done as you suggested. No loss of conversational efficiency.
>There's another point about how your comment was flamebaity: it steered the thread in a more generic direction.
I could maybe understand that in the absence of my next sentence, which was:
>>Bottom line, car culture is not some fundamental invariant of reality for getting a job, as the original comment was suggesting.
That was specifically aimed at preventing the discussion from broadening to the generalities of "Europe vs the US", by reminding readers of the original issue in dispute (necessity of car culture and accessibility of typical destinations) and asking that any discussion of European planning be mentioned with an eye for whether it speaks to that.
>id=21456176 was a predictable response to the provocation, and you reacted by taking a swipe at the poster ("I'm glad that gave you the opportunity for the zinger").
Only in the sense that you "took a swipe at me" by calling my comments flamebait. The comment you linked was unprovoked and itself flamebait in how it elevated an accident of wording to an opportunity to humorously ridicule someone with a pithy remark (rightly called a zinger). And you don't seem to have a problem with that, or the commenter's refusal to make a good-faith effort to read context.
Just as you felt the need to call out aspects of my comment that hindered quality discussion, I felt a need to call out aspects of that comment that did the same.