If you want to know population, we should use a population tag. Given
its history, much as we might like to pretend otherwise, place=city etc
really *is* no more than an arbitrary hint to the renderer, and not much
good either because it doesn't reflect the other criteria that would
determine how prominent a place appears on a map. And of course those
criteria would differ depending on what and who the map is for. Until
there is another more diverse way of working out prominence, we'll keep
going round in circles on this one.
Current definition notwithstanding, I think I favour the place value
being what people locally say the place is - if they think they are a
city, then by the "what you see on the ground" method of mapping, that
is what it is.
But how the place (label in particular) is represented on a map ought to
be up to that renderer, probably based on some weighted average of
various criteria, perhaps including that local subjective judgement, the
population bracket, home of an important institution, ...
For example, on car maps I think there's an argument for bumping up the
prominence of the set of place names used on green/blue (trunk/motorway)
road signs in the UK, because of their usefulness in navigation. Scotch
Corner is useful in this respect, but tiny (is it even a village?).
David
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