Meta is akin to Talk pages on Wikipedia, that is fine. Comments are like footnotes that contain information that I treasure. Answers from 4 people are no substitute for answers from 2 people and comments from 10 more that fine tune the answers. The comments should proudly be part of the knowledge lore, otherwise as you say other sites like Wikipedia where people take the page as the full truth already exist. I want to know what people have to say about an answer, I do not want to visit sites designed for future consumers/sheep. There are three types of people visiting Q&A sites, those who get there via Google because of a word search, those who are regulars who want to learn from answers and comments and those few who regularly comment. Why do we want to down play the first two to make life cozy for the last group. I was a regular on SEEE but here I always feel as if I have to be a performing monkey for the unwashed masses that visit. The visitor should be king.

Q&A sites aren't forums with different CSS. If you want to see conversations, visit a forum. If you want to see questions and answers and only that, visit Q&A sites. If you treasure the content that ends up in comments, either that content actually belongs in a question or an answer, or you are in the wrong place.

Comments are emphatically not footnotes. Footnotes are footnotes. Edit a question or answer to annotate it instead of using comments for this purpose.

No visitor knows they have the moral imperative to edit someone else's question or answer, that lofty power is reserved for OP/admins/moderators.

You want people to leave the small incremental bits of information in footnotes then rename comments to footnotes, stop threading at one level deep, only show the top level of comments and only those that have a positive rating by default (coming one day).

Codidact at the moment required constant policing to make people self censor and grade their submissions and has no way to let the community assist with the grading.

Does a new user even have the score to edit a question? I just went and looked, on a random community I am offered "suggest an edit", that does not inspire me to leave a update, correction, clarification or footnote to repair the question or answer in any way, if comments are frowned upon I simply walk away, a lost visitor, however I will remember the unsatisfying experience when offered Codidact in future search result.

The author of the post should edit their post and include anything worth including. Comments aren't for other people to leave information for third parties; they're for other people to communicate with the author of the post so that the author of the post can improve their own post. If you, a visitor who did not author the post in question, want to communicate additional information to other third parties, make your own post.

Codidact [...] has no way to let the community assist with the grading.

Votes. If an answer is missing a critical piece of information, if that information is in a comment but the author won't edited the post to reflect it, downvote it and post a better answer.