The thing that bothers me about the new Gawker commenting system other than the absolutely flawed reasoning behind it (Doc mentioned to me that it might be to make it more Tablet friendly, which kind of makes sense, despite the fact that that is a viewer base that really doesn't exist in any important form) is just how god awfully designed and broken it is. It's worse than the new Discuss layout, and that says a lot.
Branching discussions completely break concentration and focus and completely undermines discourse.
I mean, I know next to nothing about web design and this sort of thing. So If you give something to me and I can see its an awful piece of crud, then you know you've done something truly and awfully wrong.