I'm not a fan of the new design for the most part, but I don't dislike it as much as others seem to. Even Kevin Purdy of Lifehacker, though, strongly insinuated that he disliked the redesign.

As for the "featured comments" thing, I don't understand your dislike of it. There are large buttons at the top of the comments that let you change what it displays, switching between "Featured" and "All." I have it show all comments myself.

The main thing that annoys me about their featured comments is that it doesn't seem like people get pushed into the "featured" strata very often. I think it's left up to the users to promote other users to "featured" status and then they always show up as featured commenters. Seems like a weird system to me.

What I have always liked about their comment system is that replies to comments are hidden by default. This is essential, and something that blogs like Engadget NEED to implement. On Engadget, someone posts the first comment and then every commenter after that tends to insert their comment as a reply to that first one, and they do it just so they won't end up further down the comments page. If replies aren't shown by default, they'll just create a new comment of their own, and actual conversations can happen (not that Engadget commenters are the best conversationalists in the world).

Anyway, I wanted to compliment part of Lifehacker's comment system, even if I don't think it's perfect. Comments are a huge challenge for blogs anyway, especially popular ones.