My impression that that iNaturalist has been growing so fast that the developers are mainly focusing on trying to keep up with growth, with other projects being lower priority. Planned major changes I’m aware of like the app redesign and the Explore page redesign have been discussed or in progress for years (eBird changes are also very slow so I assume this is just how things go in development, I dunno this isn’t my field).
A complete reconfiguration of the basic philosophy of observation statuses would take a ton of thinking and discussion and planning to implement, so I can understand why there hasn’t been much attention to it.
See for example the share observations feature request which the staff labeled “very challenging” I think for similar reasons.