I think my position with dandelions is maybe analogous to my thoughts on the whole cladistics thing in general… Theoretically I like phenotypic categorization and lumping (relative to the current state of things), but in practice I feel like the current philosophy has to work itself out before the pendulum can swing back to something more practical. “The only way out is through.”
Like with dandelions the current North American model from Flora of North America is inadequate because it fails to account for the real diversity of the genus outside of the continent, some of which have shown up in North America and there aren’t good names to apply to them. On the other hand the European model is nice and thorough but excessively tedious (to put it lightly) for practical use.
What we really need is a balanced model somewhere in between, but who in the world is going to create that model? Only someone who’s had to confront both other options and is frustrated with both of them (and also has a crazy amount of time and funding to work on it). I also don’t feel like iNaturalist is a suitable place to experiment with alternative taxonomy models like that.