I think this is a very important issue, albeit one that yields a different conclusion in my mind. There is a simple way to avoid burdening contributors with detailed tags, a solution that has been used abundantly for roads: creating new values for the highway tag.
I’m not suggesting that we create new values for the highway tag. I’m saying that if we had a main tag such as path or route or pathway we could have half a dozen values that would be as many shortcuts for contributors