You don't always have to follow lore but that begs the question - why even create lore to an RPG if you want to ignore it? In the current implementation of it we know of it's lore related so that style of skirmish doesn't really have a place in the current world, it just means it would have to be designed differently. The system of hamlet was always to be designed like how XI's Campaign/Besieged was but the engine they used for 1.0 couldn't handle it, so the current "Hamlet" FATEs are more along the lines of what they wanted to do with the system initially, e.g Red Belly Hive Defend/Capture FATE.

Current the stronghold only have FATEs in them which is basically where the 'Beastmen Leaders' from 1.0 was that you had to fight for Relic back in the day. Those special leves were called Faction Leves which a lot of those are reborn as FATE NMs.