The comments about more 'sane' comments being seen, is happening.
I'm not sure if it's just the subreddits I follow (I deleted Boost for a while there, reddit is great shitting fodder though), there are definitely more posts and comments that are questioning the ongoing insanity.
The banning of so many subreddits completely backfired on them. People are addicted to reddit and it's easier to just stay there, joining other subs, or spending more time on subs that they otherwise wouldn't have. This has definitely had an impact on the content appearing in comments, and from what I can see, the content isn't being deleted any longer, whereas you'd be lucky if it lasted even 10 minutes previously on some of the banned subs.