Comment me this, Batman

I've been thinking about comments. Specifically as they pertain to posts, in threaded vs. flat format. The advantages as I see them:

• Threaded allows a person to reply directly and obviously to a specific comment in a post. Comments are children not just of the parent post, but also of parent comments.
• Flat comments allow a person to see comments in a timeline. Comments are children only of the main post.

The disadvantages:

• Coming in late to a threaded-comment conversation means seeing responses to comments that may not necessarily Alice writes a post. Bob comments. Cathy responds to Bob's comment. Dave responds directly to Alice's post. Evelyn responds to Dave's comment, then responds to Cathy's comment by telling her to see her comment to Dave below. All of the sudden, we have a couple of threads that don't necessarily flow in time. I recently saw this in a forum for a Wordpress plugin where people were trying to get support for various issues they were having. It was hard to follow their followups because posts in the various threads sometimes were complementary, but not necessarily chronological.
• Flat comments do not make it obvious whether a response is to a specific comment or to the post. "So read all the comments, lazy!" But nobody has time to do that, except in exceptional or low-volume boards. If, going back to plugin support, someone has a problem that is specific to their hardware or software setup, and thus has nothing to do with you, you don't need to follow that thread; you can skip down to the next potentially applicable thread. With a flat format, you don't have a choice, really.

I guess it all depends on the situation, as always. With threaded comments, you can have the last comment be near the top of the page. There are many cases where this doesn't matter. With flat comments, you know the last comment is the last one. If you're looking for something specifically in comments and it isn't in there by then, it's not in there. You didn't miss it. So maybe the debate isn't really threaded vs. flat. Maybe it's finding information in threaded vs. flat.

Going with flat comments is easy. That's the current default for most Wordpress themes. Threading turns out to be a styling nightmare, a challenge I'd take up if I weren't so busy at work.