With RS 1.0.8, hiding the comment/trackback settings UI from the Post/Page Edit Form causes comments and trackbacks to be turned off. This will be corrected in the upcoming Role Scoper 1.1 release. To work around it for now, go to Roles > Options > Advanced > Limited Editing Elements. Remove commentstatusdiv and pagecommentstatusdiv, then click the Update button.
I can't advise rolling back to a previous version to avoid this unless you have looked over the 1.0.8 release notes (readme.txt) and are comfortable forfeiting the features, bug fixes, plugin conflict resolutions that it added.
For inquiring minds, the new bug came when I adopted a user's suggestion to remove the "Limited Editing Elements" via WordPress' remove_meta_box() function instead of just hiding them via CSS. That works well in general, but in the case of comment / trackback settings, WordPress interprets the missing UI as an "off" setting.