For me the main advantage would be that something that is more user-friendly is more likely to be used by users.
Another potential advantage would be that, once working and tested the promotion of a comment to an answer could be restricted to only the OP and people with a high TL. That works well on other forums, because it is up to the OP to say if their original issue that brought them here has actually been answered. That in turn would offer the following advantages
1 It would mean that experts who give an answer that is less useful to a newcomer would miss out on credit for answers that are technically correct but far too complicated for the newcomer.
2. Likewise it would mean that an overly simplistic answer that misses essential complexity would also not get credit for those answers
3. The first two points, taken together, would mean that credit for questions answered would depend more than at present on the ability of the responder to assess the skill level of the questioner, and then to act on it.
In my personal opinion the empathic talent that would be recognised for the first time by such a change is the primary requisite to be answering questions here.
Expertise in debugging user errors is very important, but is still, for me, a very important second to actually delivering an answer that the OP can understand.
… and I would add to the requests already made by others to put this on the “to do” or “feature request” list. If someone will respond with a brief message telling me where and how I would add this request to the list, or bump it if it is already there, that would be warmly appreciated
