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The good thing about multiplication being commutative and associative is that you can think about it either way (e.g. 3x2 can be thought of as "add two three times). The "benefit" of carrying this idea to higher-order operations is that they become left-associative (meaning they can be evaluated from left to right), which is slightly more intuitive. For instance in lambda calculus, a sequence of church numerals n~1~ n~2~ ... n~K~ mean n~K~ ^ n~K-1~ ^ ... ^ n~1~ in traditional notation.
I'd say the deeper issue with ordinal arithmetic is that Knuth's up-arrow notation with its recursive definition becomes useless to define ordinals bigger than ε~0~, because something like ω^(ω^^ω) = ω^ε0^ = ε~0~. I don't understand the exact notion deeply yet, but I suspect there's some guilt in the fact that hyperoperations are fundamentally right-associative.