As someone who had a google account and used it for youtube, which is probably the opposite to most of you, I don't think it's that bad. However, they could have spent their time and resources trying to fix things like horrible lag with full screen chrome, and not being centred, rather than reworking the internals of the comments system.
Although, I've noticed the new character limit which has helped me to learn about the bioloy of a plant thanks to some idiot copying and pasting a Wikipedia article on the bottom of the video