overview of past events:
There was one response on topic with some good data in the previous thread worth looking at, the rest is (an admittedly engaging) discussion on whether tags that involve some, difficulty, with verifiability belong on OSM. I’ve copied it and my response below:
Please ignore off topic comments, there’s existing places for them if a new topic doesn’t need to be created. 
New thoughts:
On the thread on “pathless paths” I outlined how alpine norms in the US are to have off-trail routes that have yet to develop an informal/social/foot trail described by nodes vs ways. Some European users were more interested in having them be ways - which could be a number of different factors:
- less actual undeveloped wilderness in the EU vs US, pretty much anywhere accessible on terrain that can hold a path already has a path
- less gentle basins due to the milder glaciation in the western US that are more conducive to “find your own routes” vs needing to thread the needle for a single safe route somewhere.
- other less tangible social norms
Having some kind of death match on whether such routes should be ways or collections of nodes doesn’t seem ideal, as there is no pure right or wrong answer. One thing would be to have both be available as different options with some guidance, along with a default per region.
Another useful aspect of it would be to spin out updated keys that can be adopted regionally, using the old ones as a fallback. trail_visibility is a generally disliked key, though for different reasons, but many of those that aren’t fans of it see it as too ingrained to change. I’d argue that, but it can be sidestepped by say riffing on this great proposal by @Adam_Franco and creating say a us_trail_visiblity (though that wasn’t his stated intent) that could be used for stippling, then if it doesn’t exist the existing trail_visiblity can be used as it currently is. This would be a relatively light load to add to the logic in mapping applications, and over time could help shift use of tags and have things evolve organically (at the cost of some, hopefully not eternal, if/else statements).