Hello, welcome to Wayfarer and glad to hear you stuck around for now. I moved your post to General Discussion as this seems more of an invitation for the community to talk, hope you don’t mind.
I just want to start with saying I have not reviewed your other thread but one confusion I immediately want to clarify: games (whatever they may be at this stage) don’t steal wayspots from each other, and other games don’t steal wayspots for Pokémon GO. It’s just that there is a global database of available wayspots, and at this stage it could meet the inclusion rules for any number of, idk, between 0 and 5 games. But the fact that it met the rules for one game has strictly zero incidence on others.
As to seeing yourself out: I don’t think people on this forum can tell you whether this all is “too rough for you” or “just right”. We can only say that we appreciate your presence and are happy to help with your questions. You’re the one who knows yourself best, also psychologically, you’re the one who knows what is too much and overwelming, and you’re also the one who knows what it is that you want from this tool. If the only metric of success is to get a specific object to be a Pokéstop where the inclusion rules are not met, yes, it may end up being a disappointment and a frustrating activity.
The below is personal opinion on the “state of things” and not specific instructions directed to you.
There are, in my view, many aspects to being a Wayfarer user, and many ways to be one. What is confusing to most new people coming from playing a single favorite game is that it’s not only functioning from a game perspective, and not necessarily from the perspective of their single favorite game. During the review process it is just asking “is this a good wayspot”, not “can it be in Pokémon GO”. It is also (for better or for worse) bound by rules such as accuracy, safety and legal restrictions, and sometimes these are bigger than what is just convenient for Pokémon GO. If we approach is from a “I want a Pokéstop” perspective then this creates an inherent conflict between the fact that some stuff could be not eligible or not meet inclusion rules, out of date wayspots could be removed, etc, and the game aspect.
One view is that you are not supposed to know any of the inclusion rules, this is kind of how Niantic intends you to start as a new user. So it’s not that you have not reviewed material you were supposed to learn ahead of submitting - it’s just the way this was designed. A significant part of the community believes otherwise, and the absolute majority of the things you have been told are empiric community observations, not things communicated by Niantic. And it’s sometimes messy even at “official” level. Some of the things such as the basketball court imports are just a leftover of a game that was never developed further and the wayspots were never cleaned up. Some countries have imports of ineligible objects that are used as Pokéstops and Gyms. There are sponsorships. Power Spots are often imported random businesses. This is why you end up having additional surprises. External tools such as IITC are unfortunately not perfect and this is why it sounds like planning your submissions is clunky and somehow involves going through other games, and it sounds like there is a lot of information to process - it’s because those things were made by the community with what the community had available. There is an ongoing discussion with regards to what tools the community should have access to in order to avoid those bad surprises, and whether they can be provided officially instead of having to repurpose the maps of other games that are going to diverge. You can take a look here - it ties into your question, I think. Community Feedback: The Importance of a 'Wayspot' Map
What I would want to suggest as “the baseline” is having an understanding of eligibility criteria and rejection criteria, and remembering what is not allowed (mispinning, referencing your game of interest in titles or descriptions, using third party photos etc). This is the bare minimum not to have issues. There is also bit of a learning curve on what would be considered “well-written”, “well-presented”, “clear”, which is where it can be useful to engage in reviewing, which you appear to already be doing, and this is more regarding the success of your nominations.
As for the rest, it’s all optional, and you decide what is a priority for you. If it’s “never getting burnt again”, but you still want to submit, then as it was suggested you can carefully look at the duplicate toggle when making your nominations in Pokémon GO, you can equip yourself with IITC to look at cell lines and try to infer what already exists in Pokémon GO in order to be strategic in prioritizing what submissions you make and what objects you drop. This has limitations as said above.
One possibility though, even if we have equipped ourselves with all possible information to laser focus on Pokémon GO, done our research, presented the nomination well, we could still be disappointed. The reality is that rejection is part of Wayfarer. Sometimes it’s because of something we didn’t know, like a wayspot already being there. We checked with external tools… but the external tools we have right now don’t sync in real time, so we have no way of knowing about a recent approval even though we thought we had taken all measures of protection against it. This stings. Sometimes someone got the same thing you submitted (frequently happens with new artworks and things of this type) approved before yours completed voting. Nothing you could have done about it! And maybe your text and photo were better than what got approved, on top of that. Sometimes it’s an unjustified rejection because the community didn’t understand (or didn’t make an effort to understand) what you were presenting. Sometimes your appeal doesn’t go as planned and you disagree. Some people cannot bear to look at the “rejected” label on their nomination that they worked a lot for, or find that the red on this label is aggressive. If this hurts too much, this may not be the hobby for you.
I tend to function in a pretty blind way - a lot of I what I submit won’t appear anywhere, at least for a time. Part of the reason for this is that I don’t know if this is going to become a Power Spot, or if I have just helped someone in another game that has less regular syncs but still uses the wayspot map. That is based on a somewhat altruistic view - it may not be for everyone.