Ease of understanding says nothing about ability to extend or scale. In fact the easiest to understand approaches usually don't scale. To compare a telco system to a crossbar is a gross exaggeration. Surely you don't claim that every phone in the telco's area has a wire back to a central location where there is a crosspoint for every pair of lines. The reason their costs and size are cable limited and not switch limited is that they DON'T use a crossbar - else the reverse would be true.
Locality is a central issue in any large parallel computing machine.
You can pretend its not there, but it is. Building automated tools to make this easier to do is a very important research topic. Research for the last 40 years has hoped to eliminate the need to understand the architecture and hasn't been able to do it. We might discover some way to teleport information in the future, but today understanding how to write better software is by far the more promising approach.