I have found the landuse polygons to be a definite hassle to map around, in urban areas. Some mappers in my area go house by house, parcel by parcel, creating hugely detailed multipolygons that also happen to be wrong far too often. Trying to map around this mess is unpleasant.

The current landuse tagging leads to complex multipolygons which are fragile, in part because not all mappers understand them. Layered land use (similar to level) might be more readily understood:

The big area:
        landuse=park
        stacking=1
The small area:
        landuse=beach
        stacking=2

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I would prefer something much more tied to an already mapped boundary.

As you mention: parcel boundary polygons are generally seamless. But parcels are naturally tied to zoning (e.g. /permitted land use/) as opposed to actual (/mapped/) land use. Thus a parcel could simultaneously be:
        zoning=residential
And:
        landuse=commercial
Zoning data is often available as part of official parcel boundary data (see santa cruz <http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Santa_Cruz_County,_California>). It is pretty rare to have an (important) land use difference within a parcel. But an example is a college campus which leases land at the edge for a shopping mall.

If we could default a larger admin_level polygon to a landuse (e.g. /residential/, /farm/) then it significantly reduces the mapping clutter. At that point you just mark the exceptions. But it seems some tool help would be needed.

For areas without parcel data, streets are a possible edge. Imagine specifying that landuse is /industrial/ in the polygon formed by streets A,B,C and D. Mappers could adjust those streets and without the hassles of land use polygons. Again, too help would be critical.

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