Hm, so if I get it right, when you use "variant", you mean "way" in OSM. "Section" does not map to any concept in OSM - all the ways in a section need to have name (and colour) applied to each of them. I was trying to break down the sections into individual segments according to their difficulty as the in-place map suggests (i only properly did the purple one, note that the map is no all up to date to reality)the : https://imgur.com/a/STGasQY

I think the current way is a bit of mapping for a renderer (xtrails) and the way I used subrelation makes sense as it maps better to real world than the usage you suggest.

I have a suspicion the breakage might be due to me moving what is in description to name, I am correcting that now and let's see what it does on xtrails. If it does not help, I can go back to one relation.

Also, I think all this should be documented in the wiki even if it is still a proposal.