[asid61]

After going through the TI whitepaper (which only briefly mentions stub length and doesn't explicitly mention the words "star topology" at all, although it was a good read), running star topology doesn't seem too bad.
The main problem with stubs seems to be that the lack of termination resistor can cause reflections. The solution is to simply make the stubs no longer than "1/3 of the line's critical length" to make the reflections unnoticeable to the line.

This is explained in the following passage:
"The critical length of a bus line occurs at the point where the down-and-back propagation delay (tprop(total)) of a signal through a line equals the transition time(tT) of a signal (the greater of the rise or fall times). Network Critical Length = tT = tprop(total) Therefore, a typical CAN driver may have a 50 ns transition time, and when considering a typical twisted-pair transmission line prop delay of 5 ns/m, the down-and-back delay for one meter becomes 10ns/m. The critical length becomes 5 m (50 ns / 10ns/m = 5 m), and the max un-terminated stub length for the network is 1/3rd of the critical length, or 5/3 m (1.67 m)."

I'm not sure what the transition times or propagation delays are for a regular FRC system, but just judging from their example (which seems reasonable) a star topology should be more than doable; at the very least, it's not an all-around bad idea or straight-up useless. Does anybody (maybe from CTRE) have firm numbers for propagation delay and transition times?