I also wish it provided upvote and downvote totals, and not solely the final score - it'd allow more a lot more experiments of differing ways to display threads and comments.
I disagree, there's good reason for hiding those totals from users, in any way.
What are the reasons, and are they all trying to prevent gamification or?
AFAIK none of the APIs provide comment votes; you can only get the votes on your own comments, and only by scraping the web page :(
Yep true,. I use the same approach to run weekly top 30 hn show newsletter.