Mashin, can you point to any other mappers in CT or elsewhere in New England/NY that are actively removing accurate names from paths/footways to support your assertion: "quite common way of mapping hiking routes".  I have been involved in multiple threads over multiple years of people complaining about your practice of removing names.  I map a lot in MA/VT/NH and see no one else doing this.  CT is the land of nameless trails on Strava/AllTrails/Gaia etc.

I completely understand (and technically agree with) your argument and wish we could just rely on name in the route relation.  Unfortunately, OSM is far from having a perfect data model schema nor are the popular downstream data users completely adequate in their data parsing.  For the sake of real-world practicality, and to adhere to the OSM tenet of "community cohesion over data perfection", I request you abandon your practice of removing valid names from path/footway ways.  Thank you. 