While they are at Research Grade now, I know this change will cause, at least the North American herpers and identifiers, to become more confrontational and/or snippy with people who don’t ID at their subspecies. I don’t typically ID at subspecies for herps (minus turtles), unless I am being lazy or the subspecies is a rare/protected/endangered subspecies (aka it gets auto-obscured). I know several IDers who don’t either, but I know many more who do ID at the subspecies, consistently. Having to disagree with a subspecies ID, in order to get it to research grade (as Bill did with the watersnake observation I linked), is annoying and obtuse, in my opinion. The reason is that it then requires 3 people to overcome the disagreement instead of the 2 needed to normally change it to a subspecies.
This change changes the ID habits of several identifiers and can toss many an observation into casual. Especially for groups that have multiple levels of genus, species, and/or variety (e.g. plants, butterflies, some birds, etc.), as @spiphany mentioned.
The gopher snake observations I linked, I wasn’t super concerned about them staying in “Needs ID” for very long, as the gopher/bull snake (Pituophis catenifer) identifiers use subspecies very consistently. It was more to give more credence to what I thought was a bug.
I did not know this change occurred, and to have this change suddenly happen with no announcement on the website or anything made me think it was a bug. The announcement was made in this very post on the forums. Let’s face it, the vast majority of iNat users don’t use/keep up with the forums, and a major change (even if it was a bug fix) should have had an announcement on the main website. This is, more or less, taking away a feature of how identifications work.
IMO, it should be that the ID goes research grade, but at the species level, until a second person does an agreeing subspecific ID. Basically, it would be as if two people IDed at the species level instead of the first ID being a subspecies and causing these issues.
Granted, it is easy for me to say, “You should do this.” I do not know how hard it would be to code that and/or if it would cause more technical issues down the line.