Great post! Resteemed :)
I do think that this is going to need to be handled by community action, rather than a change to the voting/payout formulas. As was seen with the attempt to change the voting weight from 40 to 5, changes that affect how the payouts are done will be very controversial and met with resistance by people who don't want the change.
I think finding more ways to get the community upvoting comments is the right solution, since the system is already designed to pay out based on the subjective value we all assign. We just have to make the decision collectively that we value comments.
Yes you are probably correct that the community should handle this in the same way curie handled undervalued blog posters. Thanks for the kind words @timcliff !