I understand your view but I feel it's a question of volume: when the discussion is fairly slow it is possible to read all messages, but at some point it takes just too much time and you need to skim some of them (or you resort to the old heuristic of "longer=better")
Yeah, for sure it's also about volume. I'm not gonna read through 500+ comments unless it's a topic I'm really engaged in or if I'm not actively researching that topic. But I tend to skip reading any comments from things I'm not engaged in regardless, so not a huge issue for me personally.
