If you can provide me a link to the :conditional stuff, I'll try and rework my relations to use that, then I won't need to have 'my own' schema.

Yes, it's ugly, and I tried to explain what I was up against on the talk:buses page, but my edits got lost somehow.

A huge mess of subkeys is, as you say, a bad idea.

I'm not familiar with this conditional syntax that you mention. Is it documented anywhere ?

OSM doesn't seem to 'get' buses, as nothing in any of the 'official' guidelines seems to match the practicalities that are normal here in the UK. My particular problems currently are with the interval tag. What constitutes night varies throughout the country/world. What about a difference between morning/evening peaks ? What about where the peak hour service is actually 'less' than normal (because the service is effectively replaced by another one) ? Does peak refer to certain times of day, or does it refer to maximum service frequency ? What happens when the service is only 'approximately' hourly (varying from 45 minutes to 75 minutes).

The bobby444:schema is a private notation for me until I can get things stabilised. It is part of my nascent system for tagging bus services sensibly. When I've decided how it is going to work, I'll submit it as a proposal for people to vote on. I used my own username so as to avoid conflicts with other people's usages.

This 'pattern_saturday' business is part of my schema. I don't use things like interval:saturday as the bus routes where I live are very very erratic and won't fit into a simple 'saturday' system. I need to accommodate 'saturday midday', 'saturdays in summer', 'saturday morning','saturday peak', 'saturday shopping hours','saturday early evening'

My schema is broadly that I identify patterns of service and list them with their frequency and opening_times, as you have seen. The system could also be used to accommodate things like:
pattern_evening:disabled_access=no
for a bus service that has disabled access most of the time, but not on those trips which meet the 'evening' pattern.

'evening', 'saturday' etc are just names and might not even correspond to that day: I could just as easily have called them 'pattern_1' etc. They are qualified by opening hours.

The idea is that a simplistic renderer/router will just use the plain 'interval' and 'opening hours' tags, but any application that wants more fine-grained information could (but does not need to) get it from those tags.

I have been asking about the proper way to do this for about five years, with no response.

In short, I don't want to reduce 'pattern_saturday:interval' etc, because it is too coarse-grained, and assumes that the whole of a service on a saturday is the same, which it certainly isn't on my local routes.