I totally agree here. And I want to take it a step further and instead of sorting by average votes, we should merely be including it as one of many indicators, such as:

• number of direct child comments
• number of total descendant comments
• maybe length of direct child comments - a longer response is more likely to be an interesting rebuttal than a "go away troll" comment
• number of independent users among total descendant comments - if it's just the same two people going back and forth, that's just a good, old-fashioned argument that most won't care to read

And so on. But instead, we seem to just sort by upvotes - downvotes and call it a day.