The comment was already "dead" (hidden by default for low score) by the time I saw it (I have the "showdead" setting enabled, which enables users to see and second-chance review dead comments in case they think they might be "vouch" worthy) and it's generally not advisable to interact with the content that caused a thread to be flagged/dead here, beyond the second-chance reviewing. As a note, it takes many flags and downs combined with a lack of vouches and ups for a comment to reach and stay in flagged+dead status. Well, that or a moderator action, but you'll usually get a comment and/or email from them in that case.

In general though, what you say is true - the community guideline is to respond to the strongest plausible interpretation you can come up with and engage with that rather than downvote/flag, if you can. I've found sometimes, if my comment was deaded as being particular poor taste or flagged out as blatantly against guidelines, I might not get any responses as to "why" since many consider it obvious or have a hard time coming up with a constructive way to respond. Sometimes they are right, I look back as simply having woken up on the wrong side of the bed with the problems being truly obvious the next day. Other times, to counter this occasional lack of feedback when it isn't obvious to me, I take to editing (or self-replying if the edit window is closed) a genuine note like "My comment is being taken poorly, could someone take the time to explain why as I didn't mean it to?" often gets genuine responses. You seem to have found that out on your own as well, albeit here in a separate thread, and that's why I apologized for not realizing you were looking for feedback.