Hello @acydo,
Comment-oriented communities, sounds good. In the last two weeks I participate in a campaign to achieve greater engagement, following the popular advice that says something like, if you want to receive attention you must first give it. I think that's what engagement is about. Something that worries me in #Hive, seeing magnificent posts well rewarded but without any comment, perhaps, due to the validity of your argument; In this, I agree with you. I also believe there are no incentives due to the difficulty in manual healing based on the current time window, this affects the effective vote of the post and the associated comments. And if we consider those looking for easy profits using cheats to the system, we need to pause and evaluate it well before implementing it.
In the first instance, I support your idea, I would only add to the rule that the distribution of the rewards in this aside, be done, based on who receives the most votes from the commentators themselves, in the end it is they who judge the importance and relevance of comments. It would be interesting to evaluate a simple algorithm with these rules and their impact on the distribution of rewards.