The point is, mappers have already acted as editors in the vast majority of cases, and it’s working.
I’d like to standardise around this: let’s use relations for logical stages or sections that are meaningful for hikers. Also meaning: let’s not use them for other purposes. In the examples I put in the original post:
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The Appalachian Trail was split into relations representing the operators. These are also added as tags on the individual ways.
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The GR 10 has large sections, for which I don’t understand the rationale, and couldn’t find clear “from” or “to” tags to add.
In these cases, it seems like the relations are not used to represent logical sections or stages of hiking trails.
If you do hold the position you’ve outlined above, and want to standardise this to an extent, you should propose removing the existing stages or sections on trails where there are no on the ground markings.
So which is it?
We could standardise: split trails into well-defined sections using relations, either only when signs exist, or more broadly, as is common practice now.