I was talking about crowdsourcing metadata edits/corrections–the thing you quoted me talking about in 2016–not lyrics.
That’s a complicated cost/benefit analysis between spending a lot of time building and administering a collective metadata editing system + investing in automatic improvements to our metadata library, not something that breaks down to simple explanation well.
There is also an aspect of that cost/benefit that takes into account how our members will use their time contributing. Should that time be used to make metadata corrections? To make playlists/collections of albums? To fill in gaps in the artwork library? To translate Roon into different languages? To aggregate an internet radio directory? … lots of possibilities, but same pool of effort.
My statement about the “balanced approach” is basically saying: we don’t want to waste humans’ time correcting things that machines could be correcting, and we probably won’t invest in human-driven metadata correction until we’ve run out of productive avenues with the machines.
I have already confirmed that time-coded lyrics are coming in other threads. We’ve secured the data…so there are no barriers there other than getting the work done at this point. I’m not going to make a time estimate for this publicly–we don’t do that in general. Too easy for exact plans to change.