Federation would help with both breadth and potential corruption, compared to what we had with ODP/DMOZ. A federated Web directory (with common naming/categorization standards, but very little beyond that) would probably have been infeasible back then simply because the Internet was so much smaller and fewer people were involved (and DMOZ itself partially made up for that lack by linking to "awesome"-like link lists where applicable) - but I'm quite sure that it could work today, particularly in the "commercial-ish" domain where corruption worries are most relevant.