The "standard" map view definitely isn't designed to show everything; how could it? Honestly, most of the really valuable data (including most bike infrastructure) is hidden in that view. Fortunately, we can do whatever we want with the data, rendering our own maps, etc!

Looking at the cycle layer ( https://www.openstreetmap.org/note/3498476#map=17/43.66998/-79.38700&layers=C ) for example, you can clearly see the duplication with the new, separate ways. Personally, I'm in favour of removing the separate ways... there may be cases where mapping them separately is useful, but in general I think the right approach (for now at least) is to map them as lanes or aspects of the existing ways. This lets us do a lot of useful things like providing better route-planning (accounting for turns, intersections, signals). Sidewalks for example are often but not always mapped as separate ways, and the state of pedestrian routing in OSM is a bit frightful at times. It can really complicate things until/unless we have a better data model - which we should strive to reach through discussion and consensus building. 

I wouldn't consider this as time wasted. It's time trying things out and learning how OSM works, and thinking through how to best map bike infrastructure. IMO we definitely need more people thinking about that, because we have not quite reached perfection yet ;-)