This is a very interesting question and I hope my thought below could contribute an way of solution to it. This method do give a flat list without indexing, but it does have list and unlist to avoid the nesting structures. I'm not sure about the speed since I don't know how to benchmark it.
a_list<-list()
for(i in 1:3){
a_list<-list(unlist(list(unlist(a_list,recursive = FALSE),list(rnorm(2))),recursive = FALSE))
}
a_list
[[1]]
[[1]][[1]]
[1] -0.8098202 1.1035517
[[1]][[2]]
[1] 0.6804520 0.4664394
[[1]][[3]]
[1] 0.15592354 0.07424637