First: thanks for Anki. I love it.
I would find it very useful to have an optional setting available that would hide the “easy” button for any card seen within the last x minutes (the user should be able to set the value of x).
If the only reason a card was easy for me is because I have seen it multiple times within a short period, then I don’t think it is a good idea to actually click “easy.” But right now there is nothing in Anki helping me to avoid doing this.
Suppose I see a new card for the first time. I get it wrong, so I click “again.” Then it comes up again within a minute or two. Now it is easy for me because I just saw it recently. But if I click “easy,” then it will skip all the learning steps and won’t come up again for four days (assuming I’m using the default settings). Given that I got it wrong initially, it’s unlikely that I want to skip the learning steps and have a starting interval of four days. The card wasn’t really easy, it just seemed easy when I had seen the answer a minute or two before the current time.
I could just never click “easy” in these situations, but with many new cards each day it becomes difficult to remember which ones exactly I have already seen.
(I’m on desktop version 2.1.15 on Ubuntu, by the way, though I don’t think it matters much for what I’m saying.)