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>- let you pick a "max daily reviews" and then keep you from putting in too many new items up front, rather than letting you accidentally give yourself a huge daily workload after a few months

Anki allows you to do that. It's in the deck preset options under deck limits. Nowadays you can also set weekday workloads, to reduce workload eg. during the weekend.

Looking at the manual, Anki seems to let you manually set a new card limit, and also to set a review limit (after which it won't show more reviews even if they exist), but I didn't see anything for "given that I want a daily workload of this many reviews, limit my new cards automatically to try to not exceed that in future".

It is not a human failing. A human who has huge amount of free time on Sunday, but comes home from work super tired on Monday did not failed anything. And from the other side, there wont be any difference between you revising a card after 89, 90 or even 95 days.

A human who had a lot of time to learn during January, because his job workload was easy is not failing anything if his job related workload becomes high in March and April. But, all that January effort will be punished by super high workloads in March and April in Anki.

Anki has a feature named Easy Days which allows you to spend less time on Anki on some days of the week.

Source: https://docs.ankiweb.net/deck-options.html?highlight=easy%20...

You seem to be reading more into the phrase "human failing" than I intended by it. All I meant was the ordinary variations in human behaviour where we sometimes fall a little short of what we hoped we would or could do.

We seem to agree on the substance: that the SRS system should be able to work more humanely with and for the kind of entirely normal situations you describe, by for instance being able to adjust to variations in available time and picking the "best" cards to review rather than assuming the user will get through the whole lot, and in suggesting to them when they should do fewer new items to avoid difficulties in a month or two.

I feel like from a habit-forming perspective Anki would benefit from a fixed-time mode instead of varying the number of reviews. The default daily maximum is 200 reviews per deck, I think, but it's hard to tell whether that's too little or way too much until you've hit that level.

If you could set a study time of say 30 minutes, then when you skip a day, you could just do your usual 30 minutes and maybe only get through 50% of the scheduled cards, but you could slowly catch up over the next few days. And if on the contrary you run out of reviews for today, you could carry on with some scheduled for tomorrow until you've hit your target time.

FSRS can handle off-schedule reviews just fine, I think, so it should be able to accommodate such a rhythm where you don't always review cards on exactly the optimal day.

> All the SRS systems I've seen essentially assume the user is a perfect robot who will do their reviews every day without fail.

This reminds me of GTO (game theory optimal) play in poker.

There’s a perfect way to do things, so we should just try to do something as close to that as possible, right? The reality is that you can’t actually do things in this perfect way. In GTO’s case it’s that it’s too complex for a human to have memorized and in SRS many (not all) people will fail to follow the algorithm for one reason or another.

The problem is these strategies aren’t very resilient. If you miss the implementation by a bit, it can cause big losses. An algorithm that’s less theoretically optimal but more attainable by actual humans can end up much stronger in the real world.

Anki already has a max. review/day setting and has had it for a long time. In one of the recent updates, Easy Days were added: https://docs.ankiweb.net/deck-options.html#easy-days