I agree with much of what you say, however, I feel that creating a two - tier system of posts which is what you are proposing would cause an immense amount of complication and would simply confuse new posters even more.

I also think it is not necessarily right for people to decide themselves what is "timeless" - surely that can only be decided by others.

A more practical solution might be to remove the 30 day limit and have adjusted time based thresholds, so that more activity would be required to get back to the top of post tree after 30 days. This would ensure that only truly timeless work would get thrust back to the top.

Still this is a very well thought out and reasoned post. Well worth the upvote.