Hi John
I fully understand that the topic is sensitive and that it is probably difficult to find the best compromise. The reason I suggest city/village names is that we can find them in gazetteers; the utility of them is thus greatly increased if they are separated out of a free-form full text location (NLP of that being significantly more difficult). The problem I anticipate is much less having them always in the right hierarchy-field - if they can be matched to the gazetteer, that can to a large extent be simply discovered (but of course there are counties and cities that have the same name).
The other two notes were really mostly about clarifying a name and a definition, not changing much.
Since you indicate that you may be willing to change significantly more, I may want to note that the digital media people have the same problems, and had to make pragmatic compromises. I personally find the pragmatic compromise described in the IPTC extension quite convincing. It offers a hierarchy, it does not require you to class the highest region into the water/land/island classes dwc requires, it uses slightly more international terms, and it has a city or place name.
But this is a matter of personally preference of course. Personally I believe in the impact of the digital media standards. I believe that GPS recording images will trickle down to every camera - the tempation of combining your holiday pictures with some interactive mapping tool is just very tempting and lots of fun, and future observation databases might perhaps recommend providing an image voucher, with automatically recorded geolocation. I would therefore even recommend that dwc directly reuses the IPCT extension 2.0 terms and definitions (for the hierachy fields, leaving the dwc freeform-text split as an addition). But I also can think of lots of reasons (existing dwc user base, etc.) against this.
Gregor