What's even weirder is if you logout you'll see a different set of comments that logged in people never get to even see or reply to as if you type as a guest it takes forever for a comment to get thru!

Yeah that seems backwards, like it's intentional. I was investigating building a web comments platform not long ago, and concluded that you want to show the curated/sanitized comments to the not-logged-in group. Only the logged in users should see all comments. (based on their preferences)