Well it turns out that not only is the usage I knew for place=suburb deprecated, the OSM definition of suburb is completely different from North American english. I changed back almost all of the places I turned into neighborhoods. Sorry about that.
The underlying point that I failed to make previously is that suburb is the highest class of city sub-part. There are no quarters or neighborhoods mapped here, so the result is a flat topography of place names with no variation in size or importance.

@Sammyhawkrad Reverted a bunch of ped streets to footways in downtown Accra fyi.

Thx for the reply @Sammyhawkrad - I'll answer these tomorrow. Today was a chemotherapy infusion day for me and I'm crashing now (it's midnight here)

@Enock4seth Please specify which places changed to neighborhoods from suburbs are incorrect. The very definition of the suburb tag shows that it was created for rendering. Plopping a new suburb down every 300 meters goes against everything in the definition. While it could be argued that some of these are quarters instead of neighborhoods, that's mostly just semantics.

Sorry @Enock4seth didn't notice you had inserted yourself in the convo - thought I was still talking to sammyhawkrad

There is a difference between "mapping for the renderer" and "mapping so it renders". I don't map for a specific downstream client, so I'm not "mapping for the renderer" - I'm just trying to make sure that these areas and districts actually show up! It sounds like you're local and you couldn't care less about them rendering so I'll stop changing them.

Building=part has to be in a relation for it to be valid. The only parts I deleted were for buildings that were already mapped as building=yes. Some of the stand-alone parts I just retagged as building=yes.