Suggest HN: Weighing depth of comments instead of number of comments

I just saw that Ask HN: What's your greatest epiphany? was banned from the Front Page to Page 3: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7545284, because it had double the number of comments than upvotes.

Afaik, this is used to remove flame wars from the front page, however might have had a false positive in this case:

Normally, flame wars have great depth of comments, as in the comments are nested to a great extend.

However, in the above Ask HN thread half of the comments aren´t nested, but simple answers to the question.

For that reason, not sure if this is done already, but I would suggest that flame wars are investigated based on the depth of nesting instead of total number of comments.