Let’s say an anki user has 50 new cards everyday. If they miss a day, on the next day they have to do 100 new card to keep up with their desired rate of learning, if they wish to do so. Or they can alternatively increase new card number to 60 for 5 days and they will l make up for the difference. If they miss 2 days, then they should do it for 10 days, et cetera. What I suggest is that anki can automate this process. Anki can add an optional option to do so, which will take the argument of the max number of additional reviews they are ready for. Anki could also instead implement this by asking the day number, in which they user has to make up for the missed day. It would make sense if the two options were connected. For example, the user says they are ready for additional 10 cards a day and they get 2 days of additional cards. Or the user says they have 10 days and they get additional 2 cards per day. After the period is over, new card number goes back to normal.
My suggestion would partially, kind of, resolve the problem of missing anki days and delaying learning.
And now that I thought about it, the said logic and the same features could also be applied to reviews.
The options could be implemented in deck settings. One sector for new cards and one sector for reviews
I am not against this feature, but it would somehow go against Anki’s (current) logic.
That because, in your reasoning, you assume that, if the user has set a certain number of new cards per day, it’s because they want to have seen a certain number of new cards after a larger period of time. For instance, if you have an exam, you want to have learnt the material before the exam; so you plan ahead your schedule, and if you miss a day, you may want to catch up. So, with this point of view, the user has an objective and will adapt the workload based on that objective.
On the other hand, Anki currently works the other way around: since Anki’s goal is to help you with long term memorization, there is no dead line, so you can’t schedule the number of cards per day based (roughly) on the number of cards to be learned and the number of days left for you to learn. Instead, you indicate how much time you want to spend each day in learning, independently on whether you just added a bunch of new cards or if it’s a more “relax” moment. Or, alternatively, you indicate how much content you are able to learn each day (if you want to learn at full speed). In both cases, you indicate how much time at most (or how much brain power, at most) you want to spend each day in learning, no matter how much you actually learn (because it’s usually easier to plan your day saying “I’ll study for half an hour” rather than “I’ll study for a hundred new idioms”). With this perspective, you don’t want to catch up if you ever miss one day.
That being said, I think both kind of users exist (students are probably more in the first case, whereas people who use Anki to learn “for fun” are probably in the second case). Just keep in mind that Anki is probably more optimized for the second kind of usage (so far at least).