Wouldn't it be easier to just create standard pagination links at the top of the comments page, rather than manually forcing a mod to post this "list of pages" comment on each and every article?
1) there is a more link at the bottom of the page, Dan started making these comments because the UI is too subtle and a lot of people miss the link
2) I believe that he’s said they are working on performance improvements so that all the comments can be shown on a single page to solve the problem completely.
The real prize is getting the software fast enough to just render entire pages again, which is what it did for most of HN's existence.