I think it varies by language and country too. The UK had to start from zero (and this prompted the creation of OSM) but may have left a cultural impact on the kind of person who joined the project, whereas the US had freely licensed Tiger data that was really created for an entirely different purpose and created a lot of problems and stopped a community forming (or at least that's the common storyline, I think it's more complex than that).

Whereas some other countries seem to have had better sources of data available and got on with the job of figuring out the best ways to import them without making a mess.

Yeah, it's a tricky question, especially when it comes to updating (imo the initial import was fine, though some people disagree).

I like the current assisted approach of letting you turn on a TIGER 2012 overlay in the editor, and/or use tools like the "TIGER 2012 Battlegrid" (http://maproulette.org/battlegrid/) to find where OSM/TIGER differ.

So far based on some limited experience fixing OSM based on those tools, it's a good decision imo not to do it in an automated fashion, because when I've found OSM/TIGER differences, it was about 50/50 which of the two was right.