In early 2019 Tony posted a request for feedback and suggestions as the team met and made plans for the rest of the year, and then a follow-up post with specific development goals that came out of that meeting. That was a very ambitious list of goals; I can’t think of much that the team has worked on since then that isn’t on that list and only maybe half of it has been implemented in the 6 years since then. But aside from improved onboarding I think it includes basically all of things brought up in this thread. What I think is interesting is that concerns about onboarding and ID burden weren’t brought up until late in that thread (mind you people only had 4 days to see and respond it, but they weren’t really mentioned in the follow-up thread either).
The pandemic prevented the next year’s team retreat and subsequent updates from Tony focused on the items on the 2019 list (the 2023 update notes that development work had been focused towards the apps).
I think this is helpful context for a lot of the concerns raised in this thread. Those updates were helpful for getting an idea of the headspace of the team and what each year was going to look like roughly. In 2019 the iNat community and particularly the forum users were a much smaller group; it’s understandable that now it would be more difficult to gauge the community’s priorities and that the team’s resources may be strained by managing a larger platform. Maybe at some point the updates kind of became redundant as the status of each project still seemed the same as in 2023. But there is something we were privileged to have then that has been lost and I don’t think it’s wrong to find that unfortunate.