Hi Tim, its me again sorry, :D
I fully agree with you, specially something I've identified in the short time i have been part of the community is the amount of time we waste in closed chat rooms trying to do some networking and promote our posts, when we should be doing it here.
But lets be honest this has happened naturally because the platform doesn't offers a nice U.E for discussions.
Something that hinders discussions is the nesting of replies which after 5 or 6 make the posting and reading area really thin and unconfortable.
I'm experimenting with always replying to the first exchange and this seems to work, but i think that the replies are ordered according to the number of votes they get, i'm not sure if that's the case once they are in at least the first level of nesting because to be honest very few people vote on comments and therefore i have been unable to see if they get scrambled because of that.
Another thing i started is a tiny-Upvotable curation thing (is in spanish but if you want to know more I can translate it for you) where the replies from others to the comment containing the proposed post are what determine the winner in an effort to bring the discussion to steemit!
I don't know if i will succeed but i is worth a try.
Let's make this thing great by ourselves!
Interesting :)