I thought we were talking about the ecological role of dominance hierarchies among social animals.

And yes, if you never test the hierarchy, you get stagnation. The point is not that it completely eliminates competition, but that it greatly reduces it; now instead of having wasteful strife constantly, you can find a balance between efficiency and stagnation.

Since AP was asking about what was natural, I was trying to stay with the more general topic of how this plays out among social species in general before specializing to primates or 21st century humans or whatnot.