Agree, usually i'm more interested in the comments that follow than the original submission and sometimes even an uninteresting (at least for me) link leads to a great discussion.
And regarding the community turning into something different or getting polluted by off-topic submissions, the ones who can down-vote shouldn't prevent this skimming off this kind of link?
I stand corrected, just read in the FAQ that links cannot be down-voted. Interesting.
They can be flagged (and are, at least by me), which is better, because then they get killed.
But the community can change as the submissions change to appeal to a broader base.
Could you clarify that? If submissions stop (or at leas the good ones do), there's not much community left, is there?
There may not be much left as it is now but I can say without question that I would rather find a way to maintain the community without the submissions than to have submissions without community (or a community of lower quality).