"One sad development from my perspective is the significant reduction of any upvoting on comments written."

Indeed, a combination of the low Steem price with the new HF21 rules make it nearly impossible to upvote comments. The good thing is that it's a great counter for abuse and empty upvote phishing comments (that used to be a plague). It if was up to me I would just remove the comment upvotes and replace them with a tipping function. Similar to how you click on the upvote button now, it would upvote directly from your own SBD funds also making the comments go higher up based on amounts.

I'm sure it's not that hard for the devs to implement something like that and many (including myself) would be using that function.