[MaBu]

Things are changing in a way. There is Slide from Strava ( http://labs.strava.com/ ). Where you just roughly click where a path is and it creates nice path from its database of gazillion GPX tracks. It can be used as an iD editor plugin already. There are scripts for automatic lake and building creation from satellite images but most interesting thing seems to be coming from Digital Globe.

In this year state of the map USA ( http://stateofthemap.us/session/mapping-the-world-in-raster/ ) they said that this year SDK is coming where they would automatically draw buildings and streets from satellite images and you would get APIs to play with this and insert into OSM. (They already provide images to OSM through Bing and MapBox). So yes drawing streets and buildings isn't fun but you need people to know what is a street/cycleway POI and etc.. There are also projects for figuring out one way streets, max speeds.