> It's highway markers look like gel capsules
There's a long-running bug in Mapnik (the rendering engine for the tiles) that, when completed, will allow for SVG highway markers.
It doesn't really matter that they'll be fixed in the future... What matter's is that's how they look now
> Many users put their hometowns so that they're visible when you zoom out really far
Can you give more examples of this? More than likely it's due to problems with the import of TIGER data a couple years ago. It should have been fixed
Both Warren and Detroit are 'cities' in the US, so both are tagged "place=city", i.e. both at the same level. The map rendered can't draw both, so it can't decide which to show, so it picks one. It's hard to come up with a good way to rank the hierachies of cities.
It doesn't really matter that they'll be fixed in the future... What matter's is that's how they look now
> Many users put their hometowns so that they're visible when you zoom out really far Can you give more examples of this? More than likely it's due to problems with the import of TIGER data a couple years ago. It should have been fixed
See: http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=40.64&lon=-82.05&z...
New York: insignificant NYC suburbs are visible; NYC isn't (Huntington, Islip)
Michigan: no Detroit on the map; but Zeeland and Warren appear
Indiana: Angola, Auburn, Warsaw -- all cities <15,000 pop.
Ohio: Louisville and Willard
Illinois: Algonquin and Harrisburg
Pennsylvania: no Philadelphia on the map; Hazelton and Camden
> There seems to be 80 airports in every county Yea ... I'll give you that one :).
> It's incomplete in many places ... and in many more places it is more complete than Google, Yahoo, or Bing.
This is subjective.
> It doesn't even give you directions http://openstreetmap.org/ doesn't (the website is for the data and the community around it), but there are several examples of websites that do offer directions using OSM data: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Routing/OnlineRouters
Your solution is too complicated for normal people (read: non-tech people) to figure out.