if i waited for the “true experts” to get to some of the taxa that identify, i would still be waiting.
i think expand as much as you like, without overextending yourself. one way to expand the set of species you ID is to teach others how to ID the species you know. that way, the others can take on the task of identifying those species, leaving you more time to learn new species.
Yes. I have been trying to review all of Hispaniola, but yesterday (Friday), I was getting really ticked off that one user had monopolized pages and pages with nothing but hundreds of dead insects. I was grumbling, “Let other people have a turn!” So, I stepped away from Hispaniola long enough to do a worldwide sweep of the newest, and then the oldest, Potato Capsid observations that were at Needs ID.
I keep expanding because it makes me happy. Only learn grasses if you want to. My two cents
I don’t ID since a lot of time, but my thoughts on the question :
There is a lot of species that have quite a backlog here, and don’t really need to be an expert botanist, ect. to correctly ID, so go ahead ! (Only) if you want to, choose one specie/ genus you’re confortable with and that makes you happy, and you can work on it, then expand when you master it.
What I do, as I’m not really an expert myself either, is that I don’t ID stuff of other people if I’m not 99.9% sure it can’t be something else. Sure, there is some obs left in Needs ID on the pages I worked on, but better that than a misID !
Alerting “the usual suspects”- or I guess y’all are IMF [clarification- Impossible Mission Force, I think] members in this context? (Disclaimer, I don’t think I’ve actually ever seen any Tom Cruise moves.)
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/mission-impossible-identify-plantae-in-africa/43528
My Google says International Monetary Fund, but asking Tom Cruise helped. Not a film buff obvs.
Oh man, people uploading enormous batches into unknowns is such a pet peeve of mine. Half the time the pics are also bad or cultivated, but even when they’re good, I feel like an inat upload is an implicit request for volunteer labor, and if you’re going to ask for so much of people’s time you could at least try with the ID 
And I only do unknowns from 2+ weeks back so it’s not like OP just hadn’t had a chance to update. Actually I haven’t touched unknowns in awhile because I noticed I was starting to experience, like, gamer rage 
So much respect for people who keep their sanity while doing unknowns
I finally realized that the upload is not necessarily a request for labor. Not telling myself stories about other people’s motivations keeps it fun. When I fail tondo that, I get irritable. INat as spiritual practice
Once or twice - I have filtered for That Name. Skimmed thru very fast for good stuff that leaps out. Mark as Reviewed. And my Unknown stream reverts to diversity.
I know something of that inner conflict. Like when the irritable side of me grumbles, “Argh! Everyone observes the same butterflies!” And then the reasonable side of me says, “But… only certain butterflies occur there.”
Plus, maybe for a lot of these folks it’s the first time in their life that they’ve consciously observed that butterfly. Just because we’ve observed and/or ID’d it before does not mean they have. It’s easy to forget our first encounters with something that now is common and way less exciting for us.
So nice when you can find a plant that has been languishing at Dicot for years and give it a species name and the observer is still on the platform and gives a hearty thanks 
And so nice for the person who labeled it “dicot”
Hope I’m not overloading you with notifications
I never see it that way anymore
Honestly I get the same feeling when going through the fungi pages sometimes, but in a ‘the single pic of a brown mushroom from above isn’t going to be enough to ID it to family, let alone species’ way… but then I breathe and just move on because poor pictures aren’t a personal attack on me and I know I don’t have to put an ID on everything XD
I really would like to know why the CV aggressively IDs so many images of a brown mushroom with no stems/pores visible as Sutorius eximius, a species with less than five hundred observations
I bet in some cases like this (eg, Brefeldia maxima same but flat and white) it could be from a longstanding effect of false positives in the RG pool, perhaps cleaned up by now. But I bet you already know an example from Russula. ;)
Oh, you mean Russula rosacea?
EDIT: Also, I’m becoming convinced that there is an undescribed Sutorius species hanging out in Costa Rica, because there is a cluster of specimens there that all have oddly thin stipes compared to what I’m used to seeing, and there certainly aren’t any Hemlocks in central America. But who knows
EDIT 2: Oh LOL nevermind computer vision seems to think red russulas with a single picture from the top are Exsudoporus frostii
Sometimes i search the crazy species, review the ones on the area in question, and then watch the CV change. When the problem is geographic, it makes a difference quickly