Nominatim processes OSM data, associating items of interest with features like town boundaries that enclose the item, or place markers that are nearby, and then is also a fairly pedantic search interface for that data.
Photon takes the data that Nominatim generates and sticks a more flexible search on top of it.
Checking for/creating an issue for Nominatim describing the address format that doesn't work well would be a useful thing to do, as global support is a goal there.
How does https://photon.komoot.de/ do?