I understand the use of made up radicals in WaniKani since they mostly serve as vehicles for the mnemonics.
But why teach a made up meaning for a kanji ( 莫/“greenhouse”) that isn’t known anywhere else and doesn’t make sense with any of the related vocabulary either?
This is not good.
This has been addressed quite a few times, I think. Probably first in the main additions thread here.
From what i’ve gathered, none of the meanings other than endless are worth learning about/are too uncommon or outdated, and even “endless” is only found in one word
Imo they should just keep the endless as the main reading and remove greenhouse as an option. Would solve the problem
It is frustrating to see the same things being constantly brought up, but not everybody spends all their time on the forums to know all the discussions taking place. Most people only come here when something’s wrong, to report bugs, as you can see from the countless threads opened for the 頁 kanji that were all opened today.
I agree that using made-up meanings for kanji is bad, even if it’s not likely to cause any problems in this case (after all, most people will only ever encounter 莫 in 莫大). I can sort of agree with the radicals using made-up names, but those shouldn’t be used for kanji, that have dictionary entries and well-established meanings.
Wanikani’s position seems to be that since this kanji doesn’t really have any common words that use only it, its individual kanji meaning is less important than just learning the proper meaning of 莫大 (and let’s be fair, having a lesson say “you already know this kanji’s meaning from the radical” is 100x easier than having to make up a new mnemonic to tie it into the “greenhouse” radical. they could of course change the meaning of the radical, but then they’ll have to change all the other kanji lessons as well. from all points of view, just having the “greenhouse” meaning saves them a lot of time).
They did make a concession to add the meaning “endless” which sort of ties in with the vocab meaning. (“endless” itself is a pretty obscure meaning that won’t be found in most resources aimed at English speakers, but it makes sense for 莫大, while the usual meanings “must not, do not, be not” are useless because there’s no common words that use those.)
Either way, while I disagree with WaniKani’s decision to use the fake radical name on the kanji, I can’t really blame them, and it’s hard to argue that (in this particular case) it’s a detriment to learning.
On a bit of a tangent, I really wonder what the WK team do all day. Surely the mnemonic-making isn’t such an arduous process that they have to spend so much time on each new batch of items, is it?
To be honest, I feel that most radicals (especially in the later levels) are a bit pointless. A lot of them are just kanji you already know, and I don’t really see the point in “reinforcing” or “reinterpreting” them as radicals other than preserving the standard, which itself is (imo) a rather bad reason, given that before the fast levels it actually slows you down on a paid service (not accusing anyone of anything here!) and that it doesn’t to my knowledge markedly change the way the user can break down kanji. I can agree with a lot of WK’s paternalism, especially in SRS levels, but this just seems over-the-top.
(Although just to note 莫 as greenhouse is actually one of the good ones imo.)
In any case they’ve probably mulled over this quite a bit before introducing the new items. I do wish they’d post their discussion notes and reasons for doing things directly onto the forums so we don’t have to play 20-questions every time they publish new items but I suppose there’s a limit to what we might get.
I wasn’t trying to be passive-aggressive by posting two sentences and a link, though! I think a large amount of healthy discussion is ideal for a forum dedicated to a paid service like this. 
There was a time when Koichi and Viet themselves were active on the forums and interacted with the users, and were less reluctant to let us have a peek behind the curtains. I understand why now, with a much bigger user base, that’s not really possible any more, but it still makes me sad.
There are things happening behind the scenes for sure, the weekly content updates and dealing with feedback from those threads I imagine take a bit of time. Another thing I imagine is that there probably isn’t an exclusive “Wanikani content editor” position, considering they’re still a relatively small company. I imagine the people divide their time among Tofugu’s other projects as well.
On a bit of a tangent, I really wonder what the WK team do all day. Surely the mnemonic-making isn’t such an arduous process that they have to spend so much time on each new batch of items, is it?
WaniKani is one of several projects made Tofugu, which is itself a tiny company of less than a dozen people. I would be surprised if anyone works full-time on WaniKani content, although maybe one of the staff will come along and correct me.
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