It is more a matter of when these restrictions are invoked and who has permission to change them. And that might well be a decision taken by the client's set-up rather than by the server's architecture. The value of a networked system increases with the addition of nodes to it, but in an extensive system, it is unlikely that all of the servers will be up all of the time. However, we cannot always assume that absent servers will contain irrelevant information. For exploratory investigations, that is probably a fact of life, but for known-item searching, it could become a serious irritant.
Full disclosure carries other risks besides annoying some users.
As Samuelson's comments remind us, there are more interests at work on systems than those of the engineers who build them. And what you see is not always what you get.