You sound convinced of your conspiracy theory that a de-emphasis on the hierarchy and conformity was a V2 ploy. Maybe the following explanation will help you understand the need for this.

One of the movements was to recover an understanding of Church founded on biblical and patristic sources. These sources provided an understanding of the early Church as a communion of local Churches, with the bishop as the focus of unity, sharing a common faith but with a certain diversity of practice in a society that was largely pagan. Discovery of documents from the early patristic period in the late 19th-C contributed to a renewed understanding of the episcopate necessitating a re-evaluation of the relationship between bishops and in particular the bishop of Rome. It meant that the pyramidal model employed since the Constantinian era was no longer an authentic representation, a flatter model with more equivalence between local churches was opted for with renewed emphasis on scripture (paraphrase)