I agree with your view, and this is one area with HTM theory that I struggled with after I first encountered it in Matt’s “HTM Chat with Jeff”. I think where it started to click for me was after a couple of realizations. I described these ideas here, but a quick summary
- The logical boundary between hierarchical levels is actually between layers within the same region (not the connections between regions)
- When a new unfamiliar object is encountered, it may require a deeper hierarchy to initially represent it, but as it is encountered more and more frequently, the abstraction can be pushed further down the hierarchy
I believe it is this basic architecture which enables some of the less traditional forms of hierarchy that are seen in the brain (horizontal connections between apparently separate hierarchies, feed-forward skipping levels, and so-on).