Hi Elliott!

It's definitely not an experiment! I believe the idea was discussed either on the OSMUS Slack or OSM World Discord, but it would have been quite some time ago.

I personally do not like the address-on-building approach because it cannot be applied consistently. Townhomes, retail strip malls, duplexes, and the like, cannot have an address placed on the building way, as the building encompasses multiple addresses and points of interest. Addresses as separate points can be applied regardless of single/multi tenancy.

I believe the address-on-entrance method is more useful as well. If I am looking for 123 Some Street, having the address on the entrances means that I am getting routed to the correct means of accessing whatever is at that address.

It may not matter much with single family detached housing, but for a larger building with multiple entrances, getting routed directly to the correct entrance would be ideal. In such a situation, there's not a good way of clearly indicating which entrance goes to what address, short of tagging them to the same node. This method requires no additional processing step to find the entrance node of a given address, and leaves no room for ambiguity.

Pulling back and applying the addresses to an area rather than a point is to make them less precise, and possibly less functional.

Hope that helps explain what we're going for here.