Radioactive Reddit-style Threaded Nodecomments

I'm trying to recreate the same sort of threaded comments that Reddit uses, but as Merlin explained to me, it can't be done because Nodecomment threads can't currently be radioactive.

However, I think with just a little hacking the Nodes within the Threads can be sorted by Radioactivity: by changing nodecomment.module starting at line 1133: (I think)

 // Threaded comments. See the documentation for comment_render().
      if ($order == COMMENT_ORDER_NEWEST_FIRST) {
        // Newest first: find the last thread with new comment
        $result = db_query('(SELECT thread FROM {node_comments} nc INNER JOIN {node} n ON n.nid = nc.cid WHERE nc.nid = %d  AND n.status <> 0 ORDER BY n.created DESC LIMIT %d) ORDER BY thread DESC LIMIT 1', $node->nid, $new_replies);
        $thread = db_result($result);
        $result_count = db_query("SELECT COUNT(*) FROM {node_comments} nc INNER JOIN {node} n ON n.nid = nc.cid WHERE nc.nid = %d AND n.status <> 0 AND nc.thread > '". $thread ."'", $node->nid);
      }

It seems like it could be made to sort descending according to the Energy field in the Radioactivity table, instead of the NID, but my meager PHP abilities have hit a wall. I'm going to keep poking at it but if anybody wants to take a crack at making a patch (or even a separate module) I can test it out very quickly. I know there are a lot of people looking for this, it's quite possibly the best commenting system around.