I was preparing the next maintenance version and I saw that in the plugin for com_content I've added the option to disable comments with {comments=off} - at first I was really happy, that I've kept it, but soon enough I realised that this things needs to go away.
If you open the article in single view - then the comments are not shown. But if you are on the frontpage - the "write comment" button is there to be seen. The problem here is that in single view we have the variable text which contains both intro text and full text. In frontpage view we have just introtext... Which is all good, but for our purposes it doesn't work...
As you said this is a very good option for editors and I would like to have it in the system, but I'll need to redesign it.
So expect such option to appear again one day in the comments.
dev.compojoom.com/issues/767
Cheers,
Daniel