Hi Joseph,
sorry, I know that this feels frustrating, but it is certainly not about all edits to OSM. Road network is a bit of a special case. Not so long ago the road classification in US was a mess until quite long discussion and difficult agreement happened. Jnighan was part of that discussion for CT and put a lot of work in creating classification system that seems to work.

Now if people start doing tiny changes to what they personally perceive as not correct and then another group of people change half of that to something else because they have a different opinion and so on, then we end up again with a mess. 

Therefore I think for this particular case it is good to discuss what the problem with the current classification is, how does the proposed change fixes that, and then also apply it consistently all cross the state. 

Before I asked you to contact jnighan or start some discussion about it. Have you tried and what was the outcome? 
https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/157603271
I think he was still active on Slack. 


Cheers