Sure, the website's empty, which is why I'm explaining things at length here.

I'm not threatening anything, not least an edit war. You seem to have read considerable malintent into my message, when none was meant.

I'll annotate what I wrote above, in case it helps.

I guess really I'm concerned about features [entities, in OSM-speak; such as a house] being removed [from the OSM dataset] or replaced [i.e.  the way or relation (with the ID we referene from our database) being replaced, rather than the geometry] and us losing the connection [from our database to OSM entities via the entity ID], but we'll have enough bots [as in: automated processes watching for changes and letting us know; I'm already pulling minutely changes from the planet replication service) watching for this [things being deleted or replaced], so we as part of our QA, and it's only a small island, I think we'll be okay [loading the island extract into PostgreSQL using osm2pgsql takes just over 9 seconds].
