Actually there is a third pile. I recently had an updated mural photo add go into in house review where it was accepted.
Yep exactly, focussing on the ML automated photo process.
I think sometimes a human needs to see something, and appeals are great for that, but they’re far too rare to use on this. I get far too many rejections of full submissions to use appeals on photos that are just “nice to have”.
I do also think the human side of photo reviews could do more. Being able to actually flag images to be removed or de-prioritised from being the main image on that vote would be nice too (ie like the picture upvoting we can do from gifts or locally - imagine if reviewing could do that!!
That’s a really nice thing to happen 
Well spotted 
only because i just had it happen
it appears to have immediately gone into in house review. when i didn’t get two email notices, with one for submitting and one for being accepted, i checked the status.
Your concern about the ML encouraging signfarer is dead on. It creates an extremely strong incentive to focus on signs or other zoomed in rectangular shots with no background context that might lead to much nicer compositions. This is true both when nominating and updating POIs.
I had one denied that I wish I could appeal, but am out of appeals. A local condo complex has a very large fenced area containing a pool at one end, a planter with a tree in the middle, and a hot tub and picnic table at the other end. As it happens, there’s a cell line about right where the tree is.
I previously submitted (and got approved) JUST the pool, with the writeup focused on exercise snd not mentioning the other stuff. An attempt to submit the hot tub and picnic table portion, with the writeup stressing socialization, was autodenied and classified as a duplicate.