I'm not sure I can answer all of your questions, but a generic plant entry would be an entry for a plant that does not have a custom database of its own. Some parent plants don't have any general information because no one has added any yet. The admins do keep track of the parent plants without general information, and all of them will have general information at some point. The general information can be quite limited, however, because it has to apply to every single species and cultivar of the genus.
Jay, we did once have three separate hibiscus databases, one for H. rosa-sinensis, one for H. moscheutos, and one for all the other species. Photos meant for one often ended up in another, so the reasons to combine them eventually outweighed the reasons to keep them separate.
