In reality you would get situations where someone would post a thoughtful and well-reasoned comment (2 points) and someone would reply with a very minor correction (12 points).
It also seemed like "wars" were fought over points too, purely anecdotally.
My own experience is that voting now seems to be more rational. People seem to upvote when something should be upvoted (my guess is that this topped out before if someone thought a comment had too many votes). When something is negative, it's indicated so it doesn't tend to get downvoted into oblivion.
As for curating interesting comments to the top, this happens now and seems to work quite well.
I just wish there was a way to:
- Look at comments you haven't seen yet; and
- Filter comments by "quality", sorta like Slashdot has. The meaning of this can be vague and "quality" doesn't have to be a straight point measure but I'd like to see a way to just see the best comments, particularly when there are 300+ comments.