WordPress Mess...Need Some Opinions

This all stems from Michel Fortin's blog post about comment spam, the kind
that looks harmless but is really just useless crap.

Because of spam problems and because my blog gets a decent amount of
traffic, I have disabled comments. I just couldn't be bothered with the
nonsense. Akismet took care of the obvious stuff but missed a lot of the
not so obvious.

But because I realize that "useful" comments are important to a blog's
popularity, I am now confronted with a tough decision and I honestly don't
know what to do.

For one thing, with the recent WordPress upgrade (2.8.3) my Akismet
plugin, for some reason, has been deactivated. I don't know why and I'm
hesitant to reactivate it. It doesn't say a new version is available and
yet it's inactive, so this has me quite puzzled.

So, here are my questions.

First of all, is there a better spam plugin than Akismet that works with
2.8.3 that won't give me any problems? If so, I'll consider using it.

But here is the bigger question.

If I open up my blog to comments, I know I'm going to get hammered with
them, especially with some of the controversial stuff I write about.

Is there a way to moderate these quickly or am I going to ultimately be
a slave to my PC again?

If there is an easy way to do this, I will.

If not, I am thus stuck with my ultimate dilemma of deciding whether or
not it's worth opening up my blog to comments and the problems that
I know it's going to cause.

So I guess what I'm asking is this.

If you were in my place, already running a fairly successful business, and
don't really need the comments, what would you do?

Would you leave things as they are or would you activate comments?

I'm making a poll and will go with the majority on this because quite
honestly, I can't decide.

Thanks for your help.