<p>From a mathematical perspective, randomly assembled species-rich competitive communities exhibit high instability, as May’s stability theorem describes. This suggests that actual ecological communities should possess a significant level of organization in their competitive network structure, often with a modular topology, to withstand May’s instability. It is also known that a species-saturated ecological community driven by competitive Lotka–Volterra equations, following a path of competitive exclusion, lingers in a long-term state with species congregated in niche space into well-separated clusters, thereby competing in a modular manner. Without regard to origin, we characterize the modular network topology of interspecific competition in a hierarchical community, representing interspecific competition and the associated fragmentation of niche space among community species as a two-tiered process. This configuration occurs in pairs between species within individual groups (clusters) of ecologically related species and collectively among these groups as holistic ecological units—ecological species. To illustrate this hierarchical organization, we introduce a generalized multi-resource multi-species competition model that recognizes this topology as the basis of its network structure of interrelated governing equations of species dynamics. This kind of generalization substantially reduces the competitive exclusion constraints on species coexistence, thus offering a promising solution for conceptualizing the plankton paradox.</p>