Thanks for the fast reply. And kudos for cleaning up the geometry, and the import of the Marine Protected Areas. I hear what you're saying but, with respect, I'm not convinced that lots of little relations beats beats simple ways sharing nodes in terms of complexity of mapping - and particularly of maintenance. I'm not familiar with the reltoolbox plugin, but will take a look. Do you know other mappers who use this approach? Certainly it renders OK, and I don't know of any explicit rules being broken.
But it seems unusual to me, and I think it's likely that no-one else has noticed, that I may throw the question out onto talk_US or OSM-Talk to see if other people think it's "best practice". At least I'd like to know if the rest of us should be mapping stuff this way.
Cheers

Hi glebius,
I was wondering why you went to such a lot of work to "properly multipolygonize" a lot of the Monterey waterfront? Is there an advantage to having building footprints, pedestrian areas, etc, all defined as multipolygons? Multiple closed ways (areas) are allowed to share nodes in OSM (JOSM makes it quite simple) but all these multipolygons seem unecessarily complicated.
Thanks!

Hi hwescott,
I wondered why you're using leisure=park on the Smith River NRA and the Six Rivers National Forest? This is usually reserved for small, mainly grassy, maintained urban spaces. See the wiki definition, and how the Klamath NF is tagged.

The description of this changeset should have read: "Update Skyline Ridge Open Space Preserve.... etc".

You are correct. The road is "Bridgers Close", and the unnecessary recreation and the temporary "fixme" was a bit of editing clumsiness on my part. I have corrected the road name.