Several times e.g. here and its links, people have discussed the issue of questions of effectively answered in the comments, both here and on MSE, which remain in the unanswered queue.
Despite the answers to these questions (mainly, someone posting an answer, which is possibly CW), in practice it seems like this is not done so much. (Personally, I often prefer to comment rather than answer because I do not want to write down/work out many details. Also, I'm not super keen on reputation. So I don't really like the current given solution, especially for MSE.)
Anyway, my question is: is there a reason there is no "answered in comments" flag that moderators can set, which would just have the effect of removing the question from the unanswered queue? This would seem to be a potentially easy solution to many instances of this problem. Or do moderators not want this authority/responsibility for some reason? I realize that there may be many cases where it is not clear if a comment constitutes an answer, but in many cases it is (and often also clear that the OP is satisfied with the answer in the comments).