You were responding to me, and no, that's not what I meant. ;-) I'm not saying that comments are the "most important" aspect of system maintainability, but tha

You were responding to me, and no, that's not what I meant. ;-) I'm not saying that comments are the "most important" aspect of system maintainability, but that they're one of a few things that are all of top importance. Obviously, if you write spaghetti code, your system won't be maintainable, no matter how many comments you write. But that's a false dichotomy: you need to write good code and you need to write good comments. Neglecting either one leads to unmaintainable systems.