The vast majority of edits that I see when voting are to merge recordings.  In some cases this can cause a problem because recordings that should be kept separate (such as explicit vs clean) are sometimes being merged and splitting them again is a huge job.

I suspect that part of the problem is that many editors will create new recordings when they enter a release, either because it's less work than actually looking to see if there is an existing recording that matches or because creating a new recording is the default action.

My suggestion is to handle the selection of a recording in a similar way to selecting an artist for a track (or most other fields), where the editor selects from a list (as can be done currently) or specifically chooses to create a new recording (as a fall back selection at the bottom of the list).  In short, remove the default of automatically creating a new recording.

Most of the time, there will already be an appropriate recording available, unless this is the first time a release (with new material) is entered.  This is especially true for compilation albums, where many of the duplicate recordings are created.