Hi folks,
I think the iNat team has been talking about the potential for using computer vision for annotations for as long as annotations have existed. We discussed our computer vision roadmap recently and we decided that annotations for computer vision is a fun idea, but we’re choosing to prioritize other things for the rest of 2019 and early 2020, including training new versions of the iNaturalist model and chasing the grants / funding necessary to do more than one training run at a time.
I would also like to further comment that the iNaturalist staff are ~8 people, most of whom you know from your interactions on the site and here on the forums. Staff are a small (but important) part of what makes up “the iNaturalist entity” as a whole, which includes partners, curators, observers, identifiers, and everyone who uses the site and the apps.
In my personal opinion, observing, identifying, and learning are the core parts of the iNaturalist experience, and annotations are a neat feature that makes observing more interesting and aids in learning. I think that it’s wrong to cast our perspective as dismissive or to say that we think annotations are an afterthought. After all, we developed the annotations feature, as well as all the amazing graphs and other features that it makes possible. Well, I didn’t, Patrick developed it. 
Best,
alex