But the link does not always go the the same place. I personally am always clicking on external links when I meant to go to the discussion page. I would have the main link always go to the discussion page, if there is an associated external link, have it listed under the main link. Lets see if I can get this to show what I mean (grabbed from the front page)

    What is the most 2000s thing you can think of?
    submitted 5 hours ago by enormous-radio to /r/AskReddit
    4741 comments share

    Police vehicle rams protesters at anti-U.S. rally in the Philippines  
    Link: somewhere.latimes.com  
    submitted 7 hours ago by wilson_rawls to /r/news
    561 comments share

The main target is consistent, there is a clear external link if it exists. Probably could drop the Link: part.

The way I think of it is that clicking on the title is taking you to the content. For a self-post, the content is posted on reddit itself, so the content location is the same as the comments page.

That being said, they've made a few steps toward something closer to your suggestion in some places. For example, if you do a search, the search results behave this way, where clicking the title always takes you to the comments and there's a separate link (with a chain-link icon) to go to the linked content.

What do you mean 'they'? Commenting from the wrong account? ;)

Last Friday was my last day at reddit, so "they" is appropriate now.

I agree.

The same thing annoys me here on HN.