Eliminate hierarchical markup!

I understand that the purpose of the <H1>, <H2>, <H3>, etc. tags is to designate the level of sub-point within a document, rather than simply what size the font is. I do not mind using these tags for their originally intended purpose. However, the official W3C position is that a document cannot begin with a tag less than <H1>. Why? A long document can be better presented online by breaking it up into its subsections. Therefore, I want to use <H2> or <H3> to indicate across a set of documents its relationship to other documents. Also, I may have a series of points I wish to make that can have varying relationships to one another as points or subpoints. The W3C needs to seriously re-think organisational markup for application to distributed content.