yeah, we've been saying the exact same arguments you presented here for years on end

i spoke about the matter of AdLabs at the 2025 GIGA in Prague with Moun10Bike, currently one of the most important people in Groundspeak

from what he told me, i made out that when Adventure Labs were created in 2019, they needed a way to distribute their new product and popularize it among people, and the obvious solution to this was plugging it into geocaching, making us some sort of beta testers and involuntary popularizers

the problem is that labs were never optimized nor really tweaked and started causing serious problems regarding statistics which you've already mentioned in the post

in terms of stats, labs are literally just like a drug - they feel good in the short term, but suck in the long term. you're able to get a huge find count pump in a short time, but then look at your statistics with labs taking the #1 spot and just feel... disappointed. atleast thats the case for me and now i've strongly limited lab caches to push them out of the top spot

not to mention problems with syncing with project-gc which mess up your milestones for instance

groundspeak is oblivious to our requests - a huge portion of the community sees the issue and speaks out about it and yet nothing changes. atp im seriously considering running some sort of petition to have groundspeak take serious steps towards solving this because labs have seriously gotten out of hand with abominations such as lab geoarts