I don’t think it’s selfish or lazy! Everyone is going to use iNat in a different way or value different aspects of it, and that’s ok.
Welcome to iNat @BrythonLexi! I’m also from the Philly area.
As far as annotations go, my own opinion/experience is that the alive/dead annotation probably isn’t the most useful to researchers/data quality. In the papers I’ve seen, annotations are used infrequently (part of this is probably because they are also “harder” to access datawise). I think that most people treat a “default” (non-annotated) observation as alive, which is usually reasonable. I think it can be useful to annotate as “Dead” (so people can find/filter dead observations if they wish), but I hardly ever annotate as alive because I don’t see the value in it.
I think there is a lot of value in annotating life stages, especially for phenology. And annotating as other than organism (like track, feather, bone) is probably quite useful for IDers as there are good communities of IDers who will search for those.
And all of that isn’t to discourage anyone from annotating if they want to! I just wouldn’t necessarily do it if the primary motivation is to improve data quality. One thing that a lot of new iNatters enjoy and learn from is picking a specific group to ID (usually one that has some taxa in their geographic area) and learning that and also providing broad IDs on Unknowns or other high level IDs (Animals, Plants, etc.)
Some previous threads on how beginners can get involved are here:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/useful-inaturalist-tasks-for-non-experts-wiki/35034
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/ways-that-users-can-start-identifying-easily/36991
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/identification-for-beginners/15865
though I’m sure that there are more.