I thought your critique was that we didn't have enough people.

It was and is. This will not improve the situation whatsoever. The fact that Hubski requires a tutorial and a video in order to acclimate new users says a lot about the learning curve and you are making it steeper. More than that, you are punishing the people who are contributing. You're effectively giving me Alzheimers - I can say something but I don't know who heard it, and people can respond to stuff I said without me knowing it. You say you're going to solve this problem by adding yet another toggle - in other words, if users are deep enough into the minutiae of driving your site, they can opt out of brain damage.

Commenting threads are inane because everyone knows everyone else, everyone knows everyone else's positions, and everyone knows who will add what. Making those conversations harder won't improve the signal to noise ratio, it will reduce the bandwidth.

If you had asked me "what can we do to get more users" I would say "100% UI, dude" much like I've been saying "100% UI, dude" for lo this past decade. But you didn't ask me that, because you knew I'd say it, and then you'd have to rationalize yet again why you aren't going to do anything about it.