Three pieces of feedback generally.
1. Thank you for the comment collapse feature! And having the patience of Job generally speaking!
2. Some comments really stand out as exceptional and a +1 karma doesn't quite seem to be enough. Maybe if enough people save it into their favorites it could be promoted in some way? Dark blue text would be a nice feature. Not too intrusive but recognizable as a mark of quality.
3. While the karma system mostly works to deter trolls it is also a somewhat troubled concept. Each forum has political facets or biases even with the best of moderation efforts and there are noticeable shifts over time too. Is there a way to separate political point me-tooism and 'dueling' from forum maintenance?
I have two ideas that might help here. Obviously moderators getting involved is a good route to disaster, but maybe if one setting is a coarse filter to prevent a user having to see any politics. Another setting (toggled by discrete thread button) is to 're-black' a comment thread to see what the dissenting views were (and odd cases like your post being grayed out right now, maybe the flamewar detector got triggered by accident).