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Uh-oh, double-post by me.

While it isn’t done, but it is evidence of much improvement over our decades, what if we took a state-by-state approach for [city, town, village, hamlet]? You’d be correct to accuse me of “loving a big table of the fifty states with row-by-row results…” but this approach HAS worked to achieve SOME consensus w.r.t. highway classifications, admin_level, public_lands classifications and more. I’m just spitballing here, but it could both work and be an explanation for sharp differences that might be seen (in renderers at particular zoom levels) across state boundaries.

Each state could be population-based (with numbers / thresholds different from here vs. there), “must have a grocery, post office and hardware store to be called a village,” some combination, or whatever.

Edit: This does toss out the window Elliott’s “ideal” that a town is a town is a town (everywhere), but that does seem like an almost unobtainable ideal. Still, I keep an open mind.