Perhaps I can explain a bit.
At the moment, iNaturalist has 2,000,000 accounts who have posted observations. We’re closing in on 90,000,000 individual observations. Of those… guess how many people have posted identifications? 232,000. And that’s ANY identifications.
The top 50 identifiers on the site have, between us, published 16,000,000 identifications. That’s an average of 320,000 per person. Almost 20% of all observations published get identified by one of the top 50. And 60% of all observations get identified by someone in the top 500.
That means that anything slowing down the identification process, like stopping to write explanations every time, is going to result in many fewer identifications for other users.
Now, of those nearly 90m observations, only 54m are research grade. There are 34m that still need an ID of some kind. Of those 34m, 12m are at species level already, meaning they only need a confirming ID (if the given one is correct). The rest will all require a minimum of 2 IDs to get to research grade, and only if they happen to be spotted by people who know exactly what they are. Most likely they will need 3 or 4 IDs applied to send them into the right subcategories where the appropriate experts will see them.
So say it averages out to 3 IDs needed for each of those, that’s 102 MILLION identifications needed… done mostly by 500 unpaid volunteers.
It’s important to understand, we’re not in a hurry because we want to rush through and get millions of identifications to our names. We hurry because we know how frustrating it is for people to never get an identification, and we know that as fast as we’re going, new observations are arriving faster than we work. The pile is only growing bigger by the minute.
I think most of us would love to have the time to sit down and compose careful messages about our reasoning every single time, but it’s a huge tradeoff. If it takes me 15 seconds to do an ID, and 10 minutes to write out my reasoning, that’s 40 IDs that didn’t happen for other people.
All that said, there is a way you can get people to slow down and take more time…and that’s to start doing IDs, and take some of the pressure away! Pick a species you know well, or that’s easy to learn, and focus on it for a while - every ID you make means someone else can take a bit more time doing their own. If enough people become identifiers, we can eventually reach an equilibrium.