@cmcheatle @jciv @pisum have pretty much given the answer I would have.
But for a few more details, iNaturalist has 8 staff members plus one contractor (for Android). Two of us are not technically developers, we deal with the interpersonal, outreach, and organizational parts of iNat. And we have one designer, so for major things like redoing notifications, the designer has to come up with designs, then work closely with the developers working on the new notifications system. That designer is also working on other parts of the site and apps, and the developers working on notifications are also working on other features/functionality as well as just maintaining the site’s infrastructure as it grows to make sure everything’s working behind the scenes. So these things do take time, there’s simply no two ways about it.
Many of the feature requests are good ideas and I think they’d be beneficial to at least some users, if not most users. I think we all would love to add as many as possible as quickly as possible, but reality and resources limit what’s possible. Thank you for your patience and understanding, and thanks for the contributions you’ve all made to iNaturalist.
We try to make clear here that votes are there to measure community interest, but they’re only one factor when it comes to deciding whether/when to implement something. 59 people (including me) have voted for some way to search identifications, but that’s a complicated thing to add and other changes take priority because they would give greater benefit both for users and for the site’s infrastructure.
Other requests might have a few votes but are a) obviously beneficial and b) simple to implement, so those do get implemented fairly quickly. I’ve been trying to go through older requests and close or respond to them lately, but I’ve also got a bunch of other things on my plate.
We’ve been lucky to have some outside developers help us with things like markdown and the in-line editing feature for comments and ID remarks, that’s been great. These are difficult times, but if anyone has coding skills and is interested in working on iNat, here’s our Developers page and a page about setting up a dev environment.
The request still shows how many votes it received and who voted for it, but your vote there shouldn’t be counted against the 100 active votes you’re apportioned.