Please do not do this. This makes HN far less convenient to browse.

I regularly use the "N comments" information to find discussions worth reading. This has nothing to do with "being seen", it has to do with quickly finding interesting comments. The front-page screenshot you show completely removes that signal.

For a similar example, consider how many email clients show you, without opening the mail, when it was sent and whether it has an attachment. This information helps with prioritization and processing, particularly when you have many emails. Comment counts, and to some degree story scores, serve a similar function, for people who are never going to read every story on even one viewing of the front page.

I go to HN, I open a few stories and comment sections in tabs based on a combination of title, comments, and score, then close the front page and start reading.

This isn't similar to the removal of scores from comments. For those, users were already on a page full of comments, comments themselves are relatively short and shown inline, and even without scores they're still reasonably sorted by some HN-internal metric of interestingness, making it possible to just read downwards and stop when your expected value of further comments doesn't seem worth the time of continuing.

Removing comment counts and scores from stories, on the other hand, makes the front page far less usable.

To look at this from another perspective: consider the myriad stories and discussions here on HN, about Facebook and Twitter and similar trying desperately to get their users to read content they don't want to read. "Let's stop sorting timelines reverse-chronological. Let's show random things from people you don't follow. Let's make it impossible to figure out where you left off. Let's make it so when you refresh (or click-then-go-back) you get completely different content and can't find the tweet you just saw a moment ago." No, stop, don't.