For instance, the top comment at the top of the page may have 10 karma and 50 replies, while the next valuable comment has 15 karma (but was submitted 3 hours earlier), and isn't visible until halfway down the page. Without the karma displayed, it's much more difficult to skim the thread. And for all I know, the rest of the comments only have 1 point.
Plus, I recall from my reddit days that the earliest comments are way more likely to receive votes. So I always ended up trying to divide the karma by the time since post, which just distracted me.
Different strokes I s'pose.
What I recommended would encourage more voting, so you could just read the most highly ranked comments with some confidence about quality -- poor comments would probably be downvoted quickly.