Quite true, and that's part of why I'm asking the question. I'm in a weird position, being one of the SCA's "authorities" on the subject, and there's a risk of making decisions in a bubble. One objective here is to evolve this site from a personal project to a collaborative one, so this is exactly the sort of give-and-take I need before I make any decisions -- I'm pondering how things ought to be structured, and what degrees of flexibility seem appropriate in the data.

It's tricky, and ambiguous. It is clearly *not* trivially hierarchical -- but it is vastly *more* hierarchical than would be the case for modern games, and it is at least *mostly* hierarchical. That introduces some interesting tensions into the design...