My compliments on your patience in the face of some really vile personal attacks. So far as I could tell, you never lost your temper, and you gave far more grace than seemed deserved.
Personally, I gravitate towards grayed-out comments. I think that they tend to be likely to be on one or another extreme side of the intellectual bell curve. Basically, they end up grayed out because either they are too dumb or too smart for the average Hacker News user. So if I manage to run an effective mental filter to discard grayed-out comments that are on the low side of the intellectual gray curve, then gravitating towards grayed-out comments makes it more likely that I am exposed to content that is in the highest intellectual range of Hacker News comments as a whole.
Thanks for the tip about "showdead". I totally agree that there's a big danger, if one follows the strategy I described, of personal bias making one confuse "intelligent" with "what I want to be true" or with "what I enjoy because it is contrarian". However, I am aware of this danger and work to mitigate it in various ways. Also, I should mention that I don't think that grayed-out comments are 0.5 likely to be highly intelligent - I'd say it's more like about 0.1 or 0.2. Overall, I think that the benefit of prioritizing grayed-out comments, to me, has been worth it so far.
Not a mod, but that’s against the HN guidelines and is likely to keep your comment grayed out.
I thought the rest of your comment was interesting, FWIW.