These "fights" do you have any sort of metric that backs up your contention?

IMO people downvote on opinion a lot more. Now the only time I vote is to upvote someone who's faded out (I'm assuming that's what fading means) and who is usually making a point I disagree with but nonetheless a good point clearly made. From a UX perspective the fading of comments sucks.

Vote blindness makes the whole site of far less worth to me.