If curators are in fact violating the guidelines, then escalating the issue up to other curators or eventually to staff would be entirely appropriate. I haven’t seen any instances of this though.
I think it’s a pretty big stretch to say that the entire field of taxonomy across all taxa of life is “fringe”. Cladistics seems to be consensus among moden taxonomists, presumably for good reasons due to not have a better feasible alternative currently.
Charlie probably the main reason you get so much pushback is that most of your posts (on like most of the threads you post on regardless of the topic) are venting frustrations (which are understandable frustrations!) but without proposing feasible solutions to dealing with them. People have a certain degree of patience to hear out frustrations. But when they go on interminably with no clear way out, the patience starts to wear thin. It’s not that the issues you’re talking about don’t exist. It’s that you care about them more than most people, and are telling people that things need to be taken down but without proposing clear options for replacing them. It doesn’t work to gesture vaguely at foundational parts of the structure of iNaturalist, say “this is bad and needs to go”, without proposing a new structure to work from.
(I think maybe you have proposed some clearer solutions but it’s hard to keep them straight when these conversations go over hundreds of messages between multiple threads. Please do refer back to them if I’ve missed them.)
The curator guidelines indicate that the staff want iNat’s taxonomy to be based on external secondary sources, rather than by a) using primary literature or b) making up a new taxonomy system in-house. They are almost certainly not going to accept a solution based on one of those other two options. Correct me if I’m wrong but in the POWO thread, nobody offered an alternative viable external scondary source to use rather than POWO. Until someone does, POWO is apparently the best option that exists anywhere in reality. If POWO is bad, then someone needs to find or create a better option.
What I mean by proposing a detailed alternative is like an actual plan written out for what it would look like and why it would be better than the current situation. For example, I have a bunch of frustrations with how Casual and Research Grade work on iNat. After thinking about it for a while, I came up with this plan that accounts for all my frustrations and also accounts for all the intricacies of iNat’s structure that need to be worked around. I’m pretty sure that the staff won’t ever want to implement such a complicated plan that changes such a foundational part of iNat structure. However, I’m also pretty sure that this would significantly improve iNaturalist and at least I can point to it whenever the subject comes up.
Taxonomy is substantially more complicated than the Casual/Needs ID/Research Grade categorization system, and so a feasible plan for a different way to do it would probably need to be more complicated and detailed. Which is why no one yet has done it.