You may wish to think about what you get with my hex-grids or Numenta’s 1000 brain lateral connections. Both are an inherently peristaltic streams without the usual crutch of fanning in or out of connections.
Both are compatible with maps cross-connecting or level skipping as the stream ascends the hierarchy. This gets your larger assemblies in a biological plausible way.
JH also touched on this in today’s talk.
I have become invested in the concept that the streams stay mostly parallel all the way up the hierarchy. So far it has been possible to cast common tasks into this model. Some of the solutions take a radical rethink of how the brain does things - it’s not at all the way that one might do it using a stored program computer. So far the biggest win has been how well this model solves the visual palimpsest problem - layers of image fragments combining into recognition of an object.