I'd agree that it should be "importance" for trunk/primary/secondary/tertiary. The stuff about not using trunk for single-track roads just doesn't match what people are actually doing (judging by some of the roads in the Western Highlands). The physical tends to align to the importance, but what we actually tend to tag is the importance (usually based on the type of signs).
However, motorway is physical, and many of the other highway tags are defined in physical terms, or in terms of access rights. So the initial sentence needs to allow for more variety than just "importance". On the residential/unclassified question, I do tend to use highway=unclassified for non-residential urban roads. I'm not entirely comfortable using the same tag for industrial estate roads and narrow country lanes (and it probably makes matters harder for renderers than necessary). Perhaps the solution lies in qualifying unclassified roads with an abutters tag when it's used in towns. Richard
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