Problem you may be having, or feature you want: There are a lot of podcasts in the ‘Inbox’, that I may have already listened to on another platform. For these, I have to dismiss the episode from the inbox and then navigating to the episode list to mark it as played. Therefore, I think it should also be possible to mark the episode as played directly from the inbox.
Suggested solution: You could add ‘Toggle played state’ (or similar) as one of the inbox swipe actions. This would remove the episode from the inbox and also mark it as played.
We currently don’t have that swipe action in the inbox because we want to discourage building a habit of marking things as played that aren’t actually played. Just swipe it away without adding it to the queue to indicate that you are not interested. In the future we plan to introduce a more explicit new state “not interested”.