History ping!
The hierarchy was certainly designed to guarantee uniformity in lessons, processes and approaches to spreading the faith to new missions everywhere.
A more well established body of Christians could probably be left to their own to seek out and call suitable teachers and counselors just like the Jews had learned to do in what was to be a very long diaspora.
It's truly unfortunate the Bishop was caught up in the Roman persecution of Christians, but he was.
You do, of course, realize that reading the modern self-designation of the Latin church back into St. Ignatius’ use of the phrase he katholike ekklesia in his Epistle to the Smyrnaeans is tendentious.
St. Ignatius’ own ecclesiology, as summed up in the very passage in which that phrase is used, “where the bishop is, there is the catholic church”, accords with the Orthodox view of the fundamental equality of bishops, which finds its fullest expression in the use in Slavonic of a single word, “sobornosty” to encompass both catholicity and conciliarity, rather with than the papal claims advanced by you Latins, which would seem to apply the modifier “of Rome” to the word bishop.
As such, his use of the phrase “Catholic Church” is arguably in agreement with the usage found in the Encyclical of the Eastern Patriarchs (1848), which expresses the consciousness of the Orthodox, that we constitute the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church.
The Apostles Creed and the Nicene Creed are, by the grace of God in Christ Jesus, confessed on a regular basis in my household. St. Ignatius is on our list of those to remember this week as one to whom we are joined by the merits of Jesus’ atoning sacrifice.