You're correct, there are certainly some changes that have to be made to the CT list to make it National Friendly and part of what I'm working on proposing to the champs first will include a lot of language similar to "Please see local Wiki Pages / local Area Managers for information on what is considered 'Major' and mapped for this category in your area". We will still need local guidelines/specifics.
Religious Sites: Did you see my post above that puts some info about the discussion we had in CT? The one where we decided to landmark "Major" sites & quickly decided that CT had none, so we moved on, but the "Major" discussion is still valid. That's something that would be included the National Guidelines. The basic idea was if the religious site was one which someone would make a pilgrimage to/visit as a tourist attraction, it should probably be mapped - but like I said, we quickly decided that CT doesn't have any (well, since the
Holy Land park closed).
Water: I posted above that we were working on figuring out what was there & what wasn't in CT. We did the original work on the guidelines for CT when there were issues with the water layer & we didn't want to mess with it. I would certainly agree (as would the other CT users) that if it's not on the water layer, and is significant it should probably be mapped - HOWEVER, we need to talk to Waze about this as they may be adding other water bodies (they are mostly working on coastlines now) and un-submerging roads.
Cemeteries: Yes, a lot were basemapped, not all were. What value do the add? In CT, we're not going around deleting them, but we aren't adding them either.
Military Bases: There will be exceptions to every guideline as we can't write anything that is iron clad because we need flexibility. You mention Hill AFB, and it's landmarked so people don't go through the base, but 1) isn't there a fence around the entire base? 2) aren't all the roads on base a mix of "Private" and "Parking Lot" (preventing Waze from routing through the base already)? At Naval Submarine Base New London we have to keep renaming the on-base gas station to "NEX Fueling (NO PUBLIC ACCESS)" as we don't want to get complaints about unauthorized people trying to go there from off base. We've tried to reach out to a few of the on-base users (based on their editing) to work more on their map (including landmarks), but they haven't responded. Overlapping landmarks causes issues which is one of the bigger reasons we went with the city layer.
Fire Dept: In most places they are considered a "Safe Haven" and you can get emergency medical care there or if they are on a call there is a call box out front. Most maps mark these - It's worth it.
Police Dept: The City/Town name just adds unnecessary words to the map. In your example does the person being followed care if they are going to "Anytown Police Dept" or "Othertown Police Dept"? No, they just care they are going to a "Police Dept", any Police Dept. Anyway, if one were to search, they would use POI search, not landmarks. It's there to help people see it on the map.
Golf Courses: Private Courses will appear in POI Search or can buy advertising from Waze. This falls under the "Don't map individual businesses" guideline.
Stadiums: They just look cooler with the shape & the parking lot roads handle the jams & missing roads reports. It was something we played with before making this decision.
Interchanges: The issue is that larger, more complex interchanges would be very hard to build, label & control. The problem with "hacking" the city layer like that is that a report on the overpass will display as "Main St, <Exit #>" instead of the town where it is.
Other things of note, one does not have to attend a meetup to become a Champ. No one has said anything about locking the userbase out of the discussion, in fact I said the opposite several times.