The best solution to address comments is to make everything you described as an option so that every site owner can pick & choose how they want their comments to work for their site(s). Endless possibilities is what would make dolphin/TRIDENT superior than majority of the other platforms, thats what you're striving for right?

I've been begging the last few years for real time comments
http://www.boonex.com/forums/topic/Comments-now-have-live-updates.htm
Again, I would like for you guys see more to to make it so that when a user leaves a new comment, you DONT have to refresh the page to see it, instead, the new comment populates at the bottom & appears in real time (like FB). I prefer oldest first, therefore new comments will not distract from reading, or make the page jump around.

Speaking of comments, Im just now noticing that we have an option to choose how we wish comments to display here, newest first vs oldest first vs top first, then flat vs threaded. Now all you have to do is just give us site owners the option to choose whatever as default, and it wouldn't hurt anything for our users to have the option to change the default to whatever they prefer, PROBLEM SOLVED!

Of course, user preference should be saved