These are definitely good points and I considered them in the development of the extension. The biggest choice I made was not to hide blocked comments complete

These are definitely good points and I considered them in the development of the extension. The biggest choice I made was not to hide blocked comments completely. They're still on the page, just collapsed, so if you see that a user has a comment with a lot of upvotes or interesting replies you can unblock them easily. The primary reason I made the plugin is because occasionally users will repeat the same point over and over throughout the comments of an article (in multiple subthreads). In such cases, I find it much less distracting to simply block them.