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I think, but I'm not sure, that CID is maybe partly hierarchical to save storage for complex glyphs sharing sub-elements. It's not impossible that you could build a regular font table using Font Forge, but the way CID fonts work is so different that I doubt it. Hinting, for example, can apply to a row of symbols/glyphs.
Regular fonts, especially alphabetic or related, have a unique sequential entry for each character. The CID font concept seems to have been designed around elements of a distinct glyph. Some OCR for Asian languages even build a custom CID font for that document.
I can't see how you can even substitute a regular font instead of a CID font in an existing document, because they work so differently. This is also why a CID font won't subset in the same way as a regular font.
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