Reputation Spec: Proposal and Critique

I’d like to follow up on this subject as I see there is clearly demand for possibility of adding something to user profile.

I’ve gone through plugin development tutorials and I have plugin skeleton working, but I’d really like some guidance before I dive more into it..

I need some visually basic stuff.. e.g.

For each post in topic I need to get poster data, do some basic calculation e.g.

Likes-to-Posts Ratio × Total Likes Ratio = Reputation

And with this I’d like to populate poster-avatar-extra div (as plugin outlet under avatar is now phased out) and user-card-post-names plugin outlet.

What is roughly needed to get this work.. is it better to develop it as plugin or widget?

What is proper way to get and process poster data efficiently?

Are there any examples?