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Trees are nice for visualizing what is a reply to what, but with too much depth it starts looking ugly. Have you considered the stackexchange approach of allowing toplevel comments and replies to them? It doesn't capture the tiniest nuance of comment topology (not sure if that's the right word), but in practice it's trivial for anyone to follow the conversation this way, and it looks good. This also brings back some of the chronological / conversational style of a flat forum. Just that the conversations take place beneath toplevel comments so users can still easily tune out of comment threads that don't interest them.
Another approach is Tildes which supports any depth but has a feature to automatically collapse anything except toplevel comments.
You don't like Saidit comments?
I do like the idea of a user setting to have a depth to collapse at. You could even have a max length too before it needs an expand. I think that's what Reddit does. Then there could be a default value of 3 for depth (one off from your suggestion). And pretty short of max length too knowing how we all write. I'm as guilty as anyone.
Alternate idea. The three most recent leafs, and their parents are uncollapsed first. Everything else is collapsed unless expanded. This way a new comment is always visible. You should always be able to go into a thread and see what was just added to it. Keeping with the Chan like nature of threads here.
That sounds like something worth experimenting with. Would you collapse top-level comments? I think those can always be expanded.
TOTAL NIGGER DEATH