TBD I guess. Getting Shortbread to parity with OSM Carto will be a tremendous amount of effort, but OpenMapTiles would need a lot of attention too. Designing a one-size-fits-all tile schema is a monumental task, especially considering vector-specific performance tradeoffs. With so many forks and production deployments, OpenMapTiles doesn’t have as much room to experiment and address technical debt as something newer like Shortbread. At the same time, configuration-driven tile generators like Tilekiln, Tegola, and Planetiler make custom tilesets more practical, reducing the need for a general-purpose tileset to supply everything a style needs. (A style can combine multiple tilesets.) The rest of the Spirit repository shows what it could look like to combine schema and style development in one place.
Yes, one of the things that held up the MapTiler OMT layer was that MapTiler’s tileset sources place names from both Wikidata and OSM. This is the default behavior of OpenMapTiles tooling, which they offer to all their customers for a better end user experience.
The concern was that, as the initial showcase for map label localization on the OSM website, this Wikidata usage could end up confusing mappers. They’d see a place name that maybe doesn’t conform to map labeling conventions, but it would be nowhere in the OSM database. In general the use of an external dataset doesn’t prevent us from featuring a style on the site, but the potential for user confusion is a major consideration. After all, look how much confusion we’ve seen in this thread as it is!
Ultimately, MapTiler ended up disabling the Wikidata fallback – hopefully only for our website, not for all their customers just because of osm.org’s very particular use case. Other OSM-based maps still pull in Wikidata labels. For example, OSM Americana falls back to the Wikidata label if the OSM feature lacks a name:*=* tag in the selected language. But it gets away with this approach because the name=* appears underneath if it differs from the main label, for a little more user transparency.