WP3.5: Why do comments need to be plain text? Or am I missing something?

I am relatively new to WordPress – but trying to figure out the commenting ad what the best practice is.

My site is very media centric – and I want to give my users the ability to respond to my posts with links to photos and videos. Is this not a good idea?

The out of the box Visual Editor – I got the latest WP 3.5. and I am very happy with the Visual editor based on TinyMCE. However, this only works for admin users for editing posts.

I want a cut down version of this – just for comments.

Is this doable without plugin’s? I looked through all the settings and the only option I found was ‘Disable the visual editor when writing’ – but this is not related to commenting.

I saw some third party plugins description’s – but they replaces the editor that WP comes with with an older editor based on an older version on Tiny MCE. – which I don’t want to do.