>  It's about the appreciation of ground work and expertise....

If you think that I'm in favour of "armchair" or "non-local" contributions at the expense of survey you clearly haven't read anything I've written since I started contributing to OSM many years ago :)
This isn't about that - it's about how best to capture the physical reality in OSM tags.  That's why I'm suggesting you explain "what is there" to a wider audience so that that wider audience can comment on how that physical reality tends to be tagged in OSM.
