I really dig some of the ideas you have here.  The idea of incentives built around uptime are pretty compelling.  I think perhaps some sort of reward along with the punishments would work as a way to create an incentive spread that attracts people to both begin running a node as well as curating it in a way that keeps the system intact.

I recommend heading to https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1759662.0  and talking to some of the devs about your idea.  Although for a dev building your own coin is an awesome challenge it also requires a significant amount of time and effort that you may not have.  That said, there are a bevy of nascent coins that could really help you put together some of your ideas, if not on an architectural level, on the congressional or application level...