Hey StreetSurveyor — mentioned this on slack (and happy to chat more about there as well) — but in this case,  the place nodes that you removed in Barnstable were reflecting a case where the local significance of places differs from the legal administrative status of those places — and thus warranted mapping them separately.

In this case, while administratively, Hyannis is a village in the Town of Barnstable, several local mappers had come to the consensus that: the Town of Barnstable does not have a specific significant settlement within it called ‘the Town of Barnstable’ that warrants mapping with a place node.  However, the main commercial area of Hyannis — while legally a village — is much more significant than the surrounding places, and thus warranted having a place node with the value town to show that.  While the Town of Barnstable other villages (Cotuit, Barnstable VIllage, Osterville, etc) should have place=village nodes to reflect the hierarchy properly.

Simply adding a place node that matches the local administrative classification to the admin boundaries doesn’t really reflect the situation on the ground. 

(Please forgive the long comment, Barnstable is definitely a bit of a unique case — and several of us had spent some time figuring out how to reflect that, so wanted to share that context).