Respectfully, I disagree.
Its a core idea of this site, that the community does a good job of surfacing interesting interesting content; what appears on the front page is what has been upvoted sufficiently. I presume you wouldn't argue that HN users should read all submissions, and decide what is interesting and noteworthy for themselves.
You have a point, in that there may be feedback effect with comments.
Personally, I don't think that a comment being highly rated seriously effects my judgement of its content. It does, however, draw my attention to that comment.
I would argue that comment scores should not be optimised to give the most accurate rating to comments, so much as to filter comments - e.g. draw attention to comments that are interesting, and might otherwise be overlooked.
As such, if there is positive feedback in good comments being 'overvoted' I don't see a problem.
I accept that this is a subjective perspective, determined by what I want from HN. I want to use the smart community here to quickly learn important information, and gain insight; as such, I don't really care whether comment scores are 'correct', so much as whether they are useful.
As others have said, the ability to see the wider community's aggregated opinion on a particular set of conflicting comments, is also useful, where I lack the expertise to evaluate them myself - but I wouldn't be casting any votes, in such a situation.
There is a subtle feedback loop in there. After all, a comment that draws your attention will then be more likely to be upvoted by you and people acting like you.
Social proofs are bad. You should be reading the comments and then deciding what is interesting and noteworthy, not looking at comment scores and then reading and then "deciding" after your opinion has already been influenced by the group-mentality of popular opinion.
> Clearly, you think this reduced usefulness is worth it to reduce fights; fair enough.
I don't think that's a fair comparison, see above.
> So, is there any way of getting back the utility, without increasing the fights?
This is not the utility you are looking for. waves hands
In all seriousness, this kind of short cut seems nice on the surface but in reality is a bad habit: social proofs are misleading and bad, e.g. leading to groupthink. Hiding comment points was, in my view, a very good move. I certainly noticed an improvement after it happened and I think it's something that is needed in order to maintain a richness of quality in the comment threads.