There hasn't been a lot of noise about this so it might have gone unnoticed, but thanks to steve8, the mapnik map has nice new changes.
Tunnels are now being rendered for railways and motorway, trunk and primary roads; tracks are not as prominent anymore in lower zooms as they used to; and some new landuse areas got color. Oh, and we have railway bridges! Since these changes are just a few days old, your area might not be fully re-rendered yet.

In osmarender, bobkare has implemented automatic icon placement for areas, which saves us putting in the extra node for the icon.