@KarlBielefeldt FYI: I purged almost all the comments from this question. Things were starting to get out of hand, and some of the comments seemed excessive. I've also annotated one user's account due to some of the comments being borderline (or not-so-borderline) rude.

@Beofett Thanks. I've deleted quite a few comments myself as flags have come up. I'll try to check back occasionally to make sure they don't spring up again.

@Beofett Surely there were legitimate comments in some of those threads. Why did you delete those?

@eBusiness 2 reasons. 1 is that picking and choosing comments to selectively delete tends to invite more discussion about why this comment should have been deleted too, or that comment shouldn't have been deleted at all. That's why the moderator tools are built to purge all.

2 is because comments are only intended to be temporary, because anything important should be made an edit, not a comment.