Sure thing, Kam. Unpacking your questions a bit:
The drive to deploy repeats and js was an attempt to avoid performance problems associated with large choice lists for plant species. In the earliest versions of this form, I was limited to only a few hundred of the most common species due to memory demands on older devices, stemming from all the duplicate select_one plant lookup questions. My work-around was to do pre-field prep to have location-specific version of this survey with only the most abundantly observed species. everything else would be flagged as "other" and then I would supplement species lists as-needed during post-fieldwork data cleanup. It was ugly but functional.
Unfortunately, I was never able to make the repeats work. In particular the 50/20 dominance test and the report template export didn't play well with repeats. I fiddled with indexed repeats when those came out but in the end it wasn't worth the effort to overhaul.
Once we had the ability to use select_one_from_file questions, this problem went away, as the form was able to handle large 3-5k species lists despite the duplicate questions. The form still takes several seconds to load, but it's a reasonable delay, so I haven't been motivated to revisit the repeats issue. At this point I have one instance of the form for each of the USACE regional supplements, which meets out needs perfectly.
