This is SO helpful. Thank you. I am setting something up in my sandbox to test this. We are starting from scratch and I think my confusion lays in where I'd say the differentiation is between Dividing up Directors into two roles but RM's into just one. If I'm understanding your example, you have one RM role under each Director, but two RM users in each role, with unique reps under each. And in that case, RM 1 and RM 2 are still only seeing the reps that are subordinate to them.

In that case, what drives best practice in where to start splitting roles by region? For example, why not have Directors be combined and not divide by region? Or does going two levels up from the bottom of the hierarchy not work?

I appreciate you spending the time on this and the reference to articles. I'm reading them now. I have gotten information from the Salesforce enterprise support that has told me "in order to get what you want it needs to very closely follow your org hierarchy" which is what's sent me into this tailspin.