I am just getting into the PureMVC framework, starting from MultiCore up through pipes and then examining Fabrication on top of it. I believe that Fabrication by default utilizes pipes in a 'star' fashion so that your shell app will typically receive all notifications from all modules in a TeeMerge and sends them back out over a TeeSplit to all other modules minus the sending module.
So effectively Fabrication's routeNotification acts like a broadcast sendMessage.
I would love to see further elaboration on these points as well however.
For the project I am working on, I would like to utilize Fabrication, but maintain a hierarchical module structure for some of my message passing so I can perform some injections and the like. I am still working through understanding how to best do this.