Hey legends, 

Investigation into Roles v Territory Roles

Role hierarchy represents management relationships, reporting rollups, approvals, and other hierarchical workflows. ETM allows us to simplify the sales branch of the role hierarchy to contain only roles for their purpose (Job Function not a team). Then use the territory hierarchy to extend access to records based on users’ territory assignments.

• Role hierarchy affects sharing settings for all standard and custom objects in Salesforce.
• Territory Management only affects the sharing settings of accounts and the standard objects that have a master-detail relationship to accounts.

Territory Roles track user functions within territories by creating territory roles and assigning them to territory users as needed. For example, create roles such as Territory Owner, Sales Manager, Mentor, Product Specialist, Associate or Sales Representative. Users can even have different roles in different territories

In the end we went with a very simple role structure 

• Focus on data accessibility with consideration to reporting structure of the org.
• Each role in the hierarchy should represent a level of data access that a user or group of users needs.
• As a best practice, keep the role hierarchy to no more than 10 levels of branches in the hierarchy.
• Avoid Empty Roles
• Sharing setting “Grant Access Using Hierarchies” will be set to False. Records are shared via user Territory Assignment