>Do you think the community would bear more aggressive curation?

As it wouldn't affect the rank of the stories themselves, I don't see why not. It might not need human intervention either, just apply a few rules before building the comment page such as not displaying comments from a certain depth (which tend to be tangential) or not displaying downvoted comments, and preferring upvoted comments.

Hmmm. I was thinking more along the lines of more aggressively flagging/downvoting. Though I think either would see (some) members complaining about censorship.