Hi @oz6bl,
Initially I have to say that every station is useful and I can give many reasons why if needed. 
Currently, Good observation status can result from either the observation has a specific mode and has Data Artifacts or someone has marked the waterfall as Has Signal. The first one happens automatically, while the second one happens manually from any station user, who can be found if you hover over the Has Signal tag above the waterfall in each observation.
Vetting process is something that is useful for two main reasons, the first and most significant is to know the status of a satellite/transmitter (if it is alive or not), the second is to confirm (not always accurately for several reasons) that a station is in a good status.
However this doesn’t mean that all the observations need to be vetted. Currently, the “responsibility” to vet is on the one who scheduled the observations, but contributors and station owners that contribute to operations try to vet as many of them as possible. Also sometimes they give some priority to satellites that just have been deployed or have stopped/started to transmit after a long period as the status is more critical.
Again, it is not necessary to vet all of them but it would be nice to get there. And we try to get there by bringing a new way to vet that will allow us to automate the process as much as it is possible and make it more useful than it is right now for 3rd party players, like satellite teams and scientists. Also it will help to get there the planned opening of vetting to more people than just station owners, this will allow people that don’t have stations to contribute in this project like people do in citizen science projects.
The current status of this new way is in an early proposal state, which is under discussion between the developers. The next stage is to open the proposal to the community for feedback (by the way if anyone want access to review the current early status of the proposal let me know). Unfortunately due to some other priorities the proposal will not be discussed actively before 27th Jan.
I’m not sure why you feel that you have to take your station offline, is it that it gets too many observations from the auto-scheduler or that they stay unvetted? If the former then we can reduce the rate of auto-scheduling on your station, if the latter, I suggest not worrying too much about the unvetted observations.