I get that putting observations on hold isn’t the exactly same thing as the proposed draft feature, but to me, it functionally works the same. The only hiccup there is if somebody adds an identification to your observation before you have a chance to upload pictures from another camera.
To clarify, this is my process. Take pictures with my DSLR camera in the field, take one placeholder picture with my phone so I can make an observation with coordinates. Come home, import all my photos, and export from Lightroom the ones I want to upload to iNaturalist. Then upload the observations from my phone and add the DSLR photos to them as they come up. If I needed extra time to ID I do it first.
It’s not perfect of course, and I don’t think you can choose to skip uploading specific observations if you still need time to ID, it’s a batch only thing. It’s just a workaround.
I’m totally for “draft mode”. It could be the ability to hide observations, but even better would be if when they were taken out of draft mode if the “submitted” date was on the day it was taken out of draft. That way people could see it on their feed and it wouldn’t go unnoticed.