Nah, since I won’t allow separate blogs (and I’m running a single user WP) my users can use the update for blog type posts. Then if you click view, all the comments will be there too. This is useful in that when you filter by updates, you get all the ‘blog posts’ they’ve made and can use the permalink for linking others to that particular post.
Issue resolved. The gravatar rating wasn’t set so I couldn’t see the gravatars with higher rating. Set rating and gravatars are now visible. Submitted enhancement ticket to add gravatar ratings in admin for next release.