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This is the extensive followup report of a recent Letter in which the existence of self-organized criticality (SOC) in systems of interacting soft gluons is proposed, and its consequences for inelastic diffractive scattering processes are discussed. It is pointed out that color-singlet gluon clusters can be formed in hadrons as a consequence of SOC in systems of interacting soft gluons, and that the properties of such spatiotemporal complexities can be probed experimentally by examing inelastic diffractive scattering. Theoretical arguments and experimental evidence supporting the proposed picture are presented—together with the result of a systematic analysis of the existing data for inelastic diffractive scattering processes performed at different incident energies and/or by using different beam particles. It is shown in particular that the size and the lifetime distributions of such gluon clusters can be directly extracted from the …