Is there any reason why Didjaws is on here as an artist?

The Artist profile you mentioned (Didjaws), was added over 7 years ago, back when one could ignore the submission guidelines and add themselves as an Artist fairly easily (note the community member who created the Didjaws profile was jawsberrebi... hmmmm ). The criteria and creation process for new Artist profiles was changed a few years ago to (among other reasons) thwart self-created Artist profiles.

I hear you, that you'd like an Artist profile. It's great to hear that you see value in having one. I think the owners of this site would be happy to hear this too.

The "old" answer was to advise you to just fill out your personal Equipboard with your gear and carry on, as that gives you perfect control over moderating what is/isn't shown... it's a record of your gear without all the false IDs and approval process, etc... and there have been a few artists in the past who have had their own personal Equipboard and (eventually) an Artist profile too. BUT, in recent times, user Equipboards have been removed from the site search, and presumably made fairly invisible from an SEO standpoint... so there's a stronger case for the benefit of existing as an Artist profile, and not just a user account, if you're trying to fan the sparks of a nascent career. This being the case, I'm not going to sit here and tell you that having an Artist profile would be no better for you than a personal Equipboard.

All that said, my advice would be to:

1. Flesh out your personal Equipboard with reviews on your gear that detail how/why you use this gear, etc. This is the single most important thing you can do to make your profile more useful to the fans you send your profile link to. I've got your band blasting on Spotify right now, and I see you've worked with Bill Primo. Bill's Equipboard has been built up into a house of concrete and steel, so solid. Everything his fans could wanna know about why/how he chose his instruments is in those reviews.

2. Keep grinding on your music.

3. Hold tight and eventually you'll become an automatically-addable artist in the pre-sanctioned list (I forget which services that list pulls from, but it picks up fairly new and obscure artists decently) OR a fan will eventually make an Add Artist Request, even though you're not yet in that automatic list, and the Admins may (eventually) decide to approve the request.

In the meantime, there's nothing stopping you from linking folks to your personal Equipboard, and when you eventually get to the Artist profile stage, it's not like your personal Equipboard link stops working, your personal Equipboard will still have way better info and accuracy than the profile made up of people's best guesses about what gear you use, based on a picture they find on Instagram.

The only couple additional features I want to request in this case is this.

1. On the personal equipboard pages, there needs to be descriptions available right under the images of the actual gear that got tagged. That way we can elaborate on why and how we use the stuff.

I think this would be a nice upgrade. Reviews are the only option right now, but adding a personal comment everyone could see right under the image would be useful for a lot of us... at the very least, it would save readers from having to click and view the whole review for every item.

1. It would also be nice to have us be able to mark stuff like "this is what we currently use" or "we rent this regularly" or "we don't have this anymore but it was used in old records"

The customizable categories in your Equipboard give you some flexibility in this regard. For example, I have a section in my own Equipboard called "Gearly Departed" for the gear I've owned and sold or that died of natural causes, a section for gear I need to have repaired (as a reminder to myself), etc etc. You can list the same piece of gear under multiple categories.

On the topic of bullet point 1 though, there's a difference between a review of a product and what I use something for, so I'd have separate notes for each and that's why I wound up asking about such changes so that I can put down the separate notes for people to see.

Understood. Reviews are the only thing available right now, which is why I mention them. Reviews contain a separate space/area to write down you favorite settings, patches, and usage, but I understand that you want a notes space completely separate from Reviews that would show under each gear photo in your Equipboard.

Some of the major industry people are also fans of ours, so I'll have to ask them what I should do on the matter on this.

I'd be surprised if many people in the music industry were familiar with Equipboard, honestly. This is still a pretty niche site, as far as I'm aware.

Even if I get approved for my own verified artist page, I probably would want to hold off on it until the Terror Stamp reamp rig workflow gets finalised and I make a video on the Terror Stamp. They're saying it should be in the mail tomorrow. Probably a good idea to get all my rigs finalised first. I'm still expecting a new guitar this week.

Judging by myself and every musician I've ever known, your instruments and setup will always be changing. There may be a few constants, but things are always in a state of flux. My advice would be to just add to your Equipboard bit by bit as you have time, and accept that, just like your setup, it will never be in a final/perfect state. Don't overthink it ;)

Even if we all agree that I should be a verified artist, maybe it's not a good idea to make anything official yet because gear situation is pretty limbo right now.

Having an Artist profile here is not like have a verified Twitter account. Maybe the owners of this site would want to consider a "verified" type profile in the future, but when you do eventually have an Artist profile, you won't be in control of it -- Artist profiles are community-built and (for the most part) community-maintained. Your personal Equipboard is the space you get to control, and you're already as official as one can be on that front.