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.
With the old site, the two choices *show comments and *expand replies were held in a cookie, so with any subsequent visit to any other page, I'd see the same view as last time.
I don't want to click 'all' for every page.
I'm really kind of peeved at them and have not poked around for the controls for the page. I just haven't been interested in expending energy toward getting it back closer to the way it was- instead I just stopped going there.
I've seen some discussion about the possibility of arranging the page back to something more familiar, but again, I haven't done the research to see what that is all about.
I don't have an account there. I didn't like the account setup requirements for some reason and was very happy just lurking. I don't want to have to 'log in' just to get the page to view the way I want.
/rant
edit:
Ok, 'blog view' was easy enough to click... But what's the point of the sidebar with headlines if I've got all the headlines I want in blog view?
still not happy.
edit2
Ok- frustratingly clicking around on various buttons and views, I happened across a commenter that mentioned this:
http://ca.gizmodo.com/"ca" for "classic" I suppose.
Now I am happy.