hi @hsteinm!
Thanks for your feedback and welcome to the Prodigy community 
Just curious - if you're interested in viewing more past annotations, have you tried to expand your batch and history size in your configuration? By default, Prodigy uses a batch_size of 10, but you can expand this as well as the history_size (which can't be larger than the batch size) to view more past examples in the sidebar.
Prodigy is designed to handle annotations in batches. This was designed to accommodate more advanced annotation setups like updating a model-in-the-loop, back-end annotation selection (e.g., active learning), and handling multiple simultaneous annotators. This design limits the ability to show more annotations beyond those in the current batch (which Prodigy already does in the sidebar) at the same time in the UI.
There are other secondary considerations like memory or UX design. For example, Prodigy was designed for annotators' UX including minimizing the information presented to annotators to reduce the cognitive load for annotations.
But we've noted your suggestion and we'll think of ways we can expand functionality for V2.0. In our new V1.12 update, we make some major updates to Prodigy's stream (see link), namely a move away from generator-based streams. With this change, we're thinking of new ways this restructuring can provide us with new opportunities in Prodigy's UX (e.g., jumping forward in the stream or dynamically updating the UI/Prodigy's card). So thanks again for your feedback and we'll post back if we have more functionality in the future!