I follow certain blogs and the number of people who just write,''upvoted and resteemed' amazes me. I mean what is the point.
Is ranking comments by author reputation really fair?
There are many of us minnows who put time and effort into most of our comments.
I am afraid I do not have any easy answers for you. Then again I am new to steemit and still learning how all this works.
When I was a teacher we used a marking scheme to rate comments that students made on each others work. Not that I am proposing such a thing for steemit. Even then marking comments is such a subjective thing and down to how you interpret the mark scheme.
Sorry I can't be more helpful at this moment.