I understand how important comments are and reward all I can with engage tokens.
The tax on small comment votes has been very bad for engagement and I commend you trying to look for solutions to fix it.A while back I tried an experiment on @askhive for people to suggest good podcasts to listen to. I had put up a prize of 5 Hive for the best suggestions thinking it could become a very useful post to lots of people but after the 7 days not one comment and I am still sitting on 5 Hive.
As a side note I think autovotes are also doing great damage to engagement and the whole hive experience. Would love to see a #weekwithoutbots to see how it would shift the reward pool.