Is there some other way to show what the most interesting comments in a thread are? How about if I displayed the point totals for subtrees, but not for individual leaves? Would it solve the problem if you could follow other users, and see their comments graphically distinguished in some way?
Another problem is that people use point scores as a guide to voting. It's clear from voting patterns that many if not most users vote not to express approval or disapproval, but to cause the comment to have what they believe is an appropriate number of points. If I didn't display points, people couldn't do that. Perhaps that's not a problem. But if it turned out that that's what voting was for, then this could break voting, which would in turn break the sorting of comments, which would be a problem now that there are so many.
How about dispaying the rounded log(score)? You give some indication of how well a comment is doing but it's hard to vote strategically.
Not that easy with negative and zero scores, obviously, but those usually aren't the comments people are looking for.
This makes me think it would be good to remove the name of the commenter as well as the number of points a comment gets.