Hyperledger brings together many great projects and tools which have numerous applications in science and industry.
Is a blockchain necessary? Could we instead just sign JSONLD records with ld-signatures and store them in an eventually or strongly consistent database we all contribute resources to synchronizing and securing?
We can do it all centralized already but we would also all need to trust whoever is hosting this data and trust every single person who has the ability to enter the data.
Less nodes you need to trust the better, in a centralized solution where everyone can contribute you need to be able to trust everyone.
In a decentralized system where everyone can contribute, you don't need to trust anyone but give up benefits of centralization such as speed, performance and usability.
There are plenty of ways to minimize trust required with traditional cryptography though, this is not all or nothing, we have been doing this since PGP. You can get the overwhelming majority of the benefits with none of the drawbacks.