[TeMPOraL]

Er... what? Hierarchical is the very definition of "scales well". That's what you want to do when you have many instances that all need to talk to each other. Distributed means combinatorial explosion. It's... like secondary-school-level graph theory/probability.

Distributed is what you want to have for a) robustness (because redundancy means the work can be redirected to agents that are still alive) and b) adaptability (because system can restructure itself locally without the need to coordinate with the entirety of it).

Of course you want to apply those two recursively, e.g. hierarchies that encompass many peers at each level, etc., but that doesn't change the point. Frankly, the whole field of distributed computing is one big proof that hierarchies are good and desirable.