Wow, Bob's army actually got their attention. It was becoming scary how prevalent he was, but I still didn't think Google would care. Shows how low my faith in their user support has fallen.
Between Bob's army and insipid comments rising to the top, the comments sections of a lot of interesting, community oriented channels became useless (more so, even, than before). If nobody is actually looking at the comments section, then it doesn't really make technical sense to keep it as it is - it's just busy work for their engineers.
So it makes sense then for them to either attempt further fixes, or, in true Google fashion, simply remove the feature altogether.