I made these changes before I realized what the current community practice is, and although I find this practice incredibly hamfisted and meaningless, until the community can agree on a new, more meaningful and universally understandable set of terms to use with place=*, I concede that some of these changes perhaps should be reversed.

However, I will stand by certain ones even with the current broken OSM definitions. For example, the Rensselaer is a very small area, so it's total population might look the size of a "town," the central core of Rensselaer is just as dense and urban as Albany just across the river. In terms of "human geography" it is really just a part of Albany's urban landscape, and Albany's only train station is in fact in Rensselaer. Besides the fact that Resselaer is chartered as a "city" and is thought of by us locals as a city, it's clearly an urban environment as much as Albany is. If New York was like Europe or Japan, Rensselaer would be a part of Albany, but we just don't organize our communities that way. Rensselaer is a small slice of "city," not a "town" in the slightest.

While reviewing this edit, I noticed that that "random road" actually no longer exists. It sure did exist when I went to school there, and they made us run the miserable "turkey trot" along it every year in the miserable cold late fall, but that middle school and accursed superintendent's office are the last places on earth I ever want to be again, so I hadn't noticed until now what's changed.

I've just updated the roads there to reflect this reality.

I get that it's sometimes hard to list everything out. I think it's discouraged to make to many edits at once, but I don't play by those rules myself.

And I'm sorry if I'm being grumpy about it. This whole realization that the community is using the place=* feature in a way that is ham-fisted and meaningless to the way things work in America has got me riled up and miserable, and has finally convinced me that I need to step away from this crap for a while.