As someone who has been doing this for a few years in Virginia, which is plenty wet, it's not really bad. I minimize mowing until May (a little earlier this year because its been so warm so early), and the first go of it is tough, but I put the setting on the highest; then I keep it relatively short by June or July. Meaning, its really no big deal.
The real issue, as far as I'm concerned, is what are you letting grow. If you just let it all out, it's not likely that you just have commercial grass growing, but a bunch of weeds. Now I like weeds, myself, but some are less desirable than others, particularly some invasive ones, and neighbors can complain (mine don't). My approach is to selectively weed the lawn (yes, by hand, and it's a half-acre) to try to rid it of the weeds I don't want, and selectively encourage those I do (e.g. in my case, the native fleabane which flowers in May). I do see a difference in the number of insects visiting fleabane compared to non-native weeds. Now, I'm in a rural enclave of an urban area in an environmentally sensitive part of Virginia, so my approach is different than it might be if I were in a California suburb, for example.
I get loads of dandelions and dock, which I find ugly (grandmotherly conditioning) and are not terribly good for bees.
In the UK at least, they say wildflower meadows flourish on poor soil, where dandelion, dock and grass struggle. Sometimes you read that you should scrape off the fertile topsoil before sprinkling wildflower seeds, but this seems kinda perverse to me.
Instead, I weed the dock and dandelion by hand. Both have pretty evil taproots. This is enough of a task with my small garden, I can't imagine doing it for a half-acre!
I have quite a lot of tree cover, so I planted native bulbs beneath the lawn which have done reasonably well (they mostly come up before the trees are in leaf). I basically don't mow these patches from February til June, as the bulbs are best left until they die back naturally to store up energy for the next year. I mow a winding path through the long grass which looks rather nice (mowing around the longer areas is a good general tip for making things look neat rather than neglected). Other than that, I seem to have clover, creeping buttercup, cow parsley and common vetch. I rather like the vetch so spread it around a bit. This year I've put in a few ox-eye daisy plugs, which I'm told I may live to regret, but we'll see.
Nice. I think we have to choose our battles, and even in our own property I think we may end up having to take a Tom Bombadil in the Old Forest approach.
The real issue, as far as I'm concerned, is what are you letting grow. If you just let it all out, it's not likely that you just have commercial grass growing, but a bunch of weeds. Now I like weeds, myself, but some are less desirable than others, particularly some invasive ones, and neighbors can complain (mine don't). My approach is to selectively weed the lawn (yes, by hand, and it's a half-acre) to try to rid it of the weeds I don't want, and selectively encourage those I do (e.g. in my case, the native fleabane which flowers in May). I do see a difference in the number of insects visiting fleabane compared to non-native weeds. Now, I'm in a rural enclave of an urban area in an environmentally sensitive part of Virginia, so my approach is different than it might be if I were in a California suburb, for example.