Barry, welcome home. Hope trip went well and the ship was illness-free.
I think Ed's point is that physically the only difference between a terminal block and a buss is the length between the drops--in a terminal block, it's an inch or less, but in a box it can be much longer. The terminal blocks we use are not single point, as where many wires are twisted together at a single point. Ed is not addressing what flows through the cicuits, just the physical layout.
But now that you raise it, just what is a data packet composed of? Is it not a flow of electrons transmitted in bytes of 8 bits each?
OK, based on this your argument, it really isn't star vs. bus, it really is blocked vs. unblocked. A blocked, bus wired layout will do exactly the same thing. Before Ethernet became the dominate force, there was IBM's Token Ring, which was a bus system, in many ways better than Ethernet. I am not arguing that the blocked idea is a bad idea, I agree with you on that, it is just the delivery method that I see no difference in.
