Do you really think the majority of iNat users are annotating? Let alone looking at other people’s annotations? If we’re driving the website based on tools exclusively used by casual users, then I suspect the desktop website would look very, very different and a whole lot more like the app.
Honestly I wish they would annotate, of course. So many hundreds of hours of life I could get back from the nearly 10,000 annotations I’ve done 
This was the point of my original question, to ask both how/if this could be implemented, and specifically what kind of language would be useful. Instead of arguing about a “Harvest Ready” annotation I didn’t even propose, do you have other suggestions or do you believe that “Ripe” is the most functional term? If I’m doing this as observation fields, the question is still relevant because people will have the same reaction.
If phenology varying from year to year is a reason not to annotate something, I have bad news about the tool we’re talking about! Past data is a valuable starting point for all phenological concerns.
I live for the Metadata tool, it is my close and dear friend! I’m mostly trying to fight what I have dealt with in Observation Fields, where there’s way too many redundant fields that make a data mess for a plant trait that is otherwise universal. Whether it’s “Mature Seeds of Illinois,” “Prairie Harvest 2026” and seven different “Mature Seeds” “Ripe Seeds” etc, observation fields are not great options for cross-regional data sharing. See my trials and tribulations trying to resolve redundant observation fields here: Bugs on Flowers: A Survey of Too Many Observation Field Options. I promise I only ask about annotations because I know how messy OFs get.
But i guess folks aren’t into this so I’ll drop it. Thank you to the people who engaged in good faith! 