Regarding the OSM part, how was that illegal? You had 3 different sources for your information. The pictures you took were only your own and you were free to use them for whatever you wanted. Using a copyrighted map to validate that the images were correct is entirely within the use allowed by those maps. The edit was based on the pictures and your real life observation, not those other maps, so you own the edit, which your are well within your right to contribute to OSM.

I get that the OSM community is trying to practice something equivalent to a clean room reimplementation, but that's equivalent to a person in the "cleanroom" being shown a public domain code library and then a file from that same library, but taken out of a ROM dump. Yes, they saw the copyrighted file, but they also saw the public domain file so they're entirely within their right to base their reimplementation either partially or fully on it.