I tend to agree… It’s nice when we can assist with whatever research projects academics are already doing. But in the opposite direction, there are so many potential research projects on iNat that can’t really happen without academic/institutional support in one way or another. This is a really cool idea if we could convince some organization or philanthropist to contribute.
In high school I made an observation of a slug species which was new to my province. Someone suggested I confirm with a slug researcher, which I did and was then connected with several others. One of whom encouraged me to donate some specimens to a local museum and do some more searches for the slugs with the plan of getting more data and eventually publishing a paper together. However my impression was that one of the steps before that happened was that he’d travel from Europe to Canada to do dissection and DNA analysis of my specimens, which he might get around to eventually but not in the near future. Theoretically I could have (or could still) publish something on my own but the process is so tedious and I certainly had no idea what to do at the time. That paper never happened and I’ve since seen so many similar state/province/country-firsts documented on iNat that I’m not even sure whether it’s worth publishing papers for them.
There are other projects I have interest in as well based on my naturalist experiences but they would all require formal academic/institutional support too mainly because of funding and logistics (I can’t imagine I’ll ever be in a situation to self-fund projects of that scale). E.g. we can find undescribed species as much as we want, but actually describing them has a formal process and it’s a lot of work.