I get the concern about slow curation, etc… but i don’t see any other way to stop this flood of duplicative fields. And unfortunately as it stands now, the fields are very limited in their use, especially to newbies, because of that. Another alternative would be to let anyone create whatever, but also create a subset of ‘curated fields’ including a standard one for number of organisms, dead/alive, and those other commonly used ones. But without tools to merge, they might just never get used anyway.
The required fields absolutely break projects imho, making it a huge pain to add things to them. I outright won’t even participate in projects that have required fields. I guess if a lot of people really need required fields for some reason, maybe it’s a bad idea to remove them… but seriously, i don’t see any case where some observations without fields filled out are worse than many observations just never being added at all… and after all the project proponent can use the identify page to add them all in fast anyway. I guess a hybrid approach is just having collection projects that filter based on the fields, that is the best of both worlds i suppose, except that you can’t see obscured locations.
Of course, i’d be happy with just some of these changes being implemented too. Better than nothing. As it stands now i have a few standby fields i use, but i use fields a lot less than i would otherwise because they are such a mess.