Because of the way the SRS works (unless KameSame has added SRS jitter while I’ve been away), your items fall for review at fixed intervals from when you last reviewed them (including the first time you saw them). So, if you add 100 new items in a sitting, and every time you review them you get them all correct, these items are going to glob together forever. If the SRS intervals mean that they also line up with another glob you studied on another day, they can really mount up, which sounds like what is happening to you.
One solution would be to deliberately only clear some of your reviews and spread them out over time, but I think this kind of undermines the point of having an SRS. I think the better option is to think about how many reviews you’d like your workload to peak at, and then tailor the number of new items you add every day.
I think KameSame uses the same timing chain as WaniKani does (@searls, is this still correct?) and I believe, this has nine stages (with the first ones having less than a day between them). As a result, once enough time has passed, and if you never make any mistakes (not true for me) every day’s reviews would be made up of X items last seen four months ago ready to go from enlightened to burned, X items last seen one month ago ready to go from master to enlightened, X items last seen two weeks ago ready to go from guru 2 to master, etc, etc. Your daily review count should hover at around 8 times your daily intake count.
(If this is wrong, I would appreciate being corrected on it as I have been using it to mentally model my own review load.)
Finally, the suggestion I actually came here to post - the addition of study lists was a really cool feature… would it be possible for individual vocabulary item pages to indicate if they’re a part of one or more of those lists? (Curious to see if “連合国軍最高司令官総司令部” is in the N1 list )
@searls, just saw your latest post - I think it gets the message across, although I wonder if it would be better to just rip the band-aid off and say that these features are premium now (say, through Patreon) but are also open to the general userbase for now? Can’t quite put my finger on the issue, but there’s something about the “if” that I think might still lead to that kind of “I had it for free / now you’re taking it away” complaint.