New rule: OSM should have a route relation for each street by name.
Sounds extreme, right? Some folks thought so about the per-street “route” relations in Australia that were created to allow Wikimedia Maps to highlight them on a locator map. But this is clearly analogous to the route relations that many mappers have created to represent trails by name, presumably for the sake of a conveniently highlighted and detailed presentation on Waymarked Trails or OpenCycleMap, semantics be darned.
At least this was my motivation when I created route relations for local trails spanning 2½ miles (4.2 km), 4¾ miles (7.8 km), and 78 miles (125 km) back in 2011, after seeing that others had done the same. Whatever the developer thinks, I definitely was mapping for their renderer, and I don’t think I’m alone. No one should be removing name=* from these trails’ individual ways, because the relations are merely compatibility shims that technically shouldn’t exist.