That the process is sharply biased towards negativity is a cogent criticism.

Two alternatives: - Trust our representative system and have our elected representatives make decisions (ha! Although perhaps people would pay attention to local elections more if they had more direct consequences…) - Randomly select people to comment, like jury duty.

It’s not impossible to think of systems that take public opinion into account that are not the exact system we have now.

With public comment, politicians will still just do whatever they want without accountability

This is very obviously not true to me. Is there really nothing in your area that’s been cancelled or interminably held up by the public comment process?