Indeed. It seems like there is some mechanism that gives posts a second chance at making the front page, because when I wrote that comment (around a day ago) it seemed clear it was going nowhere. It's interesting to note that the timestamps on all the comments are adjusted as part of that process.
And yes, we put the OP in that pool, so it got a placement on the front page. That only lasts for a few minutes, though; after that, if users don't upvote it, it will fall off. Users upvoted this one.
You're absolutely correct. The "mechanism", as I understand it, is that the mods just manually bump up threads they think are interesting and deserve a second shot at the front page. HN has quite a lot of manual curation!