Ok - if that's how it's done, for consistency's sake - I need a set of clearly defined rules. As I mentioned originally, 'largest cities' is very open-ended. As also varies significantly from state to state. Are the 'largest cities' incorporated cities? Does that also include townships? Can it not include suburbs? Who defines whether said place is considered a suburb or not? If Lapeer - being the largest city in Lapeer County - isn't going to be considered a city - then what does? We need population perimeters, geographic perimeters, etc. in order to determine the correct classification, given OSM's lack of a clear definition.

Reading through that help section, there seems to be a lot of discretion given, with no hard and fast ‘rules’. It even states that these things can vary significantly from country to country. In my mind, we should be following the laws of the state and/or country that you are mapping in.

So the actual jurisdictional status that a municipality has is irrelevant? Then, I guess the next question is: what determines 'largest cities in a state?' Is it top 10, 20? Do they need to meet a pre-determined population threshold?

Sure. There are a lot of places in Michigan that are unincorporated, and are therefore not cities, villages, or townships (the three legal entities recognized as political jurisdictions by the State). All other places are either Census Designated Places (CDPs) and/or a simple hamlet - in which case the place isn’t recognized by the State, nor the Census. In Jenison’s case, it is simply a CDP. It has no political jurisdiction as it doesn’t exist as a political entity. Georgetown Charter Township is the only political entity that exists for that area. Therefore, I classified it as a suburb instead of hamlet. But if you believe hamlet is a better term for Jenison, I wouldn’t disagree.