Generally when I use “I” on the forum I’m speaking for myself, as was the case when I wrote “Correct, it [annotation] has to be done one at a time. Which I think is good, IDs and annotations should should be important enough that you should take some time to do them.” I’ll try to be more clear in the future when I’m expressing a personal opinion.
I’m not sure what “importance” means here, or what you mean by “are they an afterthought “feature” that are useful only if volunteers want to spend hours updating 420,000 lep obs from just the US and Canada?”
I personally think they’re important, I pretty much always annotate my own observations after uploading (not this past weekend’s ones, sorry!) and I wrote a tutorial showing people how to use the Identify page to add annotations.
I don’t consider @kiwifergus’s comment to be dismissive at all, just a factual statement which he explained further in his post above. Annotations are not required in order for an observation to obtain any general data quality level, so unless you are talking about a specific project that requires annotations, I don’t think they are “required” for anything.
And yes, hearting on the forum does not necessarily mean one agrees with the reply. I tend to use them when I think someone made a good contribution to the discussion, but I’m not particularly consistent in my use of them.
As for annotations and the importance of them to iNat…we definitely think they’re important, but right now our focus has been keeping up with iNaturalist’s massive growth. That’s about basic things, such as making sure the site stays functional and responsive (@pleary has done a phenomenal job on this), keeping iNat a safe place for our users (thank you curators!), etc.