The single reward pool could work, but there was a decrease in rewards for comments for many months from what it was for awhile. This did decrease discussion some from what it was when this was not the case.

Tbh, the reason for this was pretty obvious to me. Engaged whales were voting at 1%, and non-engaged whales(which is a ton of them) weren't voting on comments at all because they weren't reading them.

IMO, its a mistake to change the rules of the game every time you see something undesirable. If ned and dan and the steemit, inc team really want to see comments rewarded, they have more than enough vote power to reward them. They should use that vote power rather than change the rules so that they don't have to.