Welcome to the forum @matthewlewis896! The concerns you listed about
…wouldn’t worry me so much if the suggestion farther above could be implemented to make it…
This addresses both your concerns, and any concerns about potential errors even on high-level IDs. If the automated suggestion is wrong or inappropriate on a problematic observation, at least this will be more likely to be discovered and corrected by a human identifier. If that then retracts the automatic ID at the same time, the observation is on its way through the ID process like any other newly non-Unknown, and the auto-ID is prevented from contributing to any subsequent “State of Matter Life” limbo.
Am I correct that you would be doing this via the iNat API? If so, I would encourage you to contact help@inaturalist.org first and ask them to make sure that what you have in mind is a permissible API use. One question I would have is, to whom does an automated ID get attributed? In your scenario I would have to assume to your own user account?
We should probably also continue discussion on what an appropriate “age” would be before an Unknown observation would be subject to an automated ID. There has been a suggestion to measure against date last updated instead of date posted, so that if there is any ongoing exchange of comments or other activity on the Unknown, that wouldn’t get interrupted by an automated ID.
As for taxonomic level, my opinion would be to not go any lower than Phylum, to maximize likelihood of a correct ID. Subphylum might work well enough in the case of Angiosperms, but maybe not so well across other Kingdoms and Phyla.