alt Hacker News>A project like OSM would be bombarded with spam and junk submissions if it didn’t have these barriers to submission.
I'm not sure about this. The barriers to submissions are honestly more likely to cause object and amenity level data to become out of date. Google is able to have such an up to date place database because it relies on a large quantity of crowdsourced submissions, and employs consensus to figure out the truth.
Having out of date public book boxes isn't really that big of a deal, at least compared to the massive amounts of broken entries, duplicates, and incorrectly licensed data that would end up from free and unrestricted bulk imports.
As it is today you can largely expect OSM POI data to be incomplete or out of date unless you have someone particularly keen on keeping your local area up to date. OSM is best used as a background map layer for your own custom applications, like embedded maps in apps showing your own data overlayed. Rather than an alternative to the google maps app.