In general we haven’t wanted to add gamification to iNat for two main reasons:
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it provides a lot of incentives for bad behavior (whether malicious or not) and can reduce data quality - sometimes significantly. This happens often, especially when things like grades are attached to numbers.
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we hope that people see their encounters with non-human organisms as intrinsically special and not related to extrinsic rewards or competition.
As a few others have menteioned here, there are plenty of stats iNat provides (both all the time and Year in Review) that one can use for motivation - I certainly do. I try, for example, to get at least one new-to-me species each month for the Year in Review, which makes sometimes take a closer look at things, or do some research to get an ID for something I’m not familiar with.
All that being said I do understand how motivational rewards like badges can be, especially for someone just getting into observing nature, and it’s one reason we added them to Seek. Since it’s pretty difficult to add a ton of observations via Seek, we felt it would have a fairly minimal negative impact on iNat data quality.
What would be interesting is to see whether, once someon is really into Seek and wants to start using iNat, we could help them make that conversion, where it hopefully becomes a more intrinsically rewarding experience. Some sort of one-time-post-old-Seek-obs-to-iNat functionality might be cool for that, but would take some development and would also be confusing.