Firstly, thanks for the brilliant commentary. Extremely useful and thanks for your time. I do agree that “Load More Comments” button would probably more user friendly than just pre-loading 15-20 comments. I do like very much how Disqus actually ranks the comments “newest first”, “most liked”, etc. While I presume it is possible to custom code any part of it, I am starting to see the purpose behind moving the conversation to Discourse as well, it gives a lot more flexibility and freedom.
The news blog I am working on is popular, so in light of launching our own forum around the subject, I wanted to start building my own community instead of handing off userbase to Disqus. That’s where the idea, inspired by how The Verge handles it, came to me. Getting people to register once for a social account (Discourse) and use that to comment under stories. The legitimate reason to have blog posts having its own separate conversation is that a healthy percentage of people prefer to just comment on the news and not get involved in the whole conversation. However, this is something that I am still considering. Just investigating the technical options that a platform like Discourse provides at this stage.