Look at https://arxiv.org/pdf/1502.06461 if you want to try a chord dht again.
Kademlia is a lot less intuitive, but by not ever assuming it's tables are correct, it handles and corrects inconsistency (and malicious nodes) better.
Chapter 6 of this pile of (my) crap https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/cs_diss/106/ talks about doing latency optimization on dht routing. Basically just embedding then network graph into a metric space.
Some documentation can help with those issues though. I find it helps more because you’re writing to yourself why you’re making certain decisions and it helps when you decide to make others. It just so happens that it’s also a great way to onboard people.
The need for ordered/reliable links is mostly for convenience of development at this stage, but that can be fixed for sure.