It's too bad that firsties will effectively be killed in the Kinja switch.

Yup. Something very similar to that effect.

It's just amazing to me that they held this town hall so we could ask questions and see if they could change things we don't like. And their responses ran the gamut of: we can't change that, we won't change that and you comment the wrong way and you can leave if you don't like it.

Oh, who cares?
I'm still pissed off about the aloof, "fuck you, you're commenting wrong" answers from the Kinja tech guys.

Because FUCK YOU! That's why!

That's not the point of this site. Or the community that has grown in the comments.

So its an editorial/programming decision to herd comments in one direction and limit free conversation?

That's not useful in the least, and is in fact far more complicated than it needs to be. And when you say "nested", you only mean one indentation into the discussion, because Kinja doesn't support full nesting.

The gist I'm getting from the responses here are that all the things we hate about kinja, like the gray comments, lack of nesting, and lack of up votes are still there, won't change, and…oh well!

The star system is in no way equal to the upvote system. That's disingenuous.
I've seen starred comments on Deadspin and other sites that have more than others and they're below them. It doesn't equate to an upvote.

What about the upvote points?
You said you're porting over all of our comments, what about the points?

One of my main concerns is readability.
In kinja, there is hardly any nesting of comments, making it very hard to hold a conversation.
Will you implement proper nesting of comments?

Well believe me, I calculated the odds of this succeeding versus the odds I was doing something incredibly stupid…and I went ahead anyway. —Crow T. Robot, MST3K: The Movie

They said we're keeping our comment history. And we can port over these profiles to the new ones.
But I can't imagine they'd also port over the upvote stuff.
They SHOULD. But I don't know how it would be integrated into Kinja.

Then we're going to drag them to hell with us.

Generally, I would agree with your first two points.
But they did care and they did notice during the sidebar debacle a few months ago. When they implemented it, they were flippant about the effects it would take on the community, but afterwards they were very conciliatory.

Okay, I've been thinking. And I think what we as a commentariat need to do is boycott the site when Kinja goes live.
For a few days at least, or a week.

Fuck Kinja.

Fuck your music Newswire! I wanna talk about Kinja and what a mistake it'll be for this site!

Funny how they care about the community now and how we're an integral part of the site and how they want us to stick around, when 6 months ago during the aborted sidebar disaster, Sean was telling us how minutely we affect traffic and any inconvenient changes to the commenting system are tough titties for us.