My account is new but I'm a long time lurker. From personal experience it gets easier to skim over the low-impact parts after having spent some time using the site. It just happens naturally: you will soon be able to gauge a comment thread's usefulness in seconds.

To be honest I am glad the comment scores are not displayed and that there is less attention given to usernames. This prevents the hivemind-style comment ranking that is probably the single worst flaw of Reddit.