I'd appreciate having the bins that you mentioned. My issue is that often times I see a parent comment being corrected by a child comment. However, due to no point values, I often dont know who is correct and who isnt. Here's an example:

http://files.jjcm.org/example1.png - Here we see a comment as it is now on HN. At the moment, I dont know if my page has a legitimate problem or not.

With comment scores, I'll immediately know whether the problem is universal ( http://files.jjcm.org/example3.png ), or if it's simply isolated to a specific user ( http://files.jjcm.org/example2.png ).

This is an issue that I find I encounter time and time again on HN. While comments are sorted by best score at each level, between indentation levels there is no way of discerning which is more highly ranked. I think having a system such as feral's logarithmic bins would be a nice middle ground here.