(part 2; part 1 above)
After briefly investigating, I found little major difference outside of the boundaries of some of these features having been fused/overlapping with those of adjacent areas. Since I haven't found a clear explanation of why these wayIDs are exported under the wrong categoriy or how to correct that, to prevent potential data losses I've decided to simply renew these few problematic wayIDs by re-mapping said features as areas. I have only done this for features mapped by our fellows, and the majority have had very few edits, if any, by other users (and most did not exist on OSM before being added by our fellows)--which hopefully limits the loss of information as much as possible. 
(part 2; part 3 below)
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            Published using OSMCha: https://osmcha.org/changesets/145307458
            