Well, there’s the legal designation, and then there’s what to do when the legal designations don’t quite line up with the established tags.
Meanwhile, the original idea was to emphasize relative importance, but everyone seems to have a different idea of how to measure importance from their own perspective. Hey, let’s use population as an objective metric – but then you get a map of big suburbs you’ve never heard of. Well, the people in rural parts of the country would like to lop a few zeroes off the population thresholds because their place labels are drowning in landcover.
I feel for you. A little consistency would make the world seem a little less rowdy. But even when inconsistency creates real problems for data consumers, there’s still the hard task of getting everyone to look at classification from someone else’s perspective far far away. I haven’t cracked the riddle yet.