I’m mostly thinking that this would be helpful – and looking for anywhere it’s already been put into practice.

This doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with reputation – except tangentially when you may know that some event happened in the past (related to your current reputation decision-making) and you’re looking for it in a stack of ‘all prior events’. If you can find it more easily, more quickly, then it could affect your decision-making – because it’s relevant during that decision-making window of time. As a technique for IR, having a ‘draggable probability density function’ seems like a worthy path of inquiry as a researcher.