I know how unsatisfying this is going to sound, but: this is a point on which we just have to pull rank. It's our job to foster the kind of site where signal/noise ratio doesn't completely suck, and many years of experience have taught us that generic tangents lead to low-quality discussions that grow like weeds.
I don't think I agree with you, but I want to make sure I understand what you're saying before I go down that route here. What exactly do you mean by a "generic tangent"? You originally said "political", but now you say "low-quality"? Are political discussions inherently low quality, or is low-quality in this context in addition to it being political in nature?
Do you think tedious or blatantly illiterate comments get as many flags as vaguely tangential or vaguely controversial comments?
(I really think there are lots of comments that are "blatantly illiterate", in that they respond to a meaning that is just obviously not in the parent. I guess that only kind of breaks the assume good faith guideline, as they are missing the meaning rather than mischaracterizing it.)
The point of the question is whether the userbase has been trained to respond aggressively to only a subset of low signal comments.
I'm not sure about tedious—there's an awful lot of tediousness in internet forum comments—but we certainly see many flags on blatantly unsubstantive posts.
