Steve, thanks very much for your diligence and clarification. I appreciate it. I got a wrong steer on how access=permissive was supposed to be used and I've since clarified that both in these discussions with you and with discussions on the OSM community groups. 

My overall goal was to map what's on the ground (which is clearly a lot of illegal trails) and I veered into this access issue. Sorry if I've been a pain in the butt. That was really unfortunate and not my intention. Thank you for your patience.

Toby