Interesting. So the current implementation saves an entire copy of the node body for every comment that's added/updated? So ultimately every time a comment is added, we essentially store a new revision of the node body?

I'd guesstimate that every article we publish gets 50-500 comments during the standard editorial workflow. That said, even the longest "feature articles" are only 2,000 - 2,200 words.

If a piece of content has 50 comments, do we have to load the node body 50 times, or do we instead just load the currently visible body which would contain all currently visible comments?

Do we have a way to expose just a list of comments themselves, without the node body?  (ie, views integration is provided so perhaps a views listing of all comments...?)