ok, your example explains the river as an area which i’ll need further down the road.

but right now i’m just mapping what is way 4 in your example. even then it’s far longer than 2000 nodes. i used the “split way” tool of josm to split a 4000 node segment into 3 smaller chunks, but still get the too many nodes error. for now i left a gap between the chunks, looking for a way to mend that.