The brief image outage was a problem with the cloud service provider that hosts the image server. We do have a plan to add redundancy there, but all our devops people have been buried in work associated with hardfork 24 still.
Not sure why you're having a problem seeing the replies page, send me the URL and I'll see if I can duplicate it. Would also be useful to see who you're using as your api node server.
As far as the rep system goes, you're correct, one aspect will be that your reputation server will be able to sign information with your Hive keys as a "proof of identity". This allows you to create reputations that are correlated to your Hive accounts.
I think public perception is very important and so having systems that are working most of the time is obviously a high priority. We cannot afford outages.
Sometimes my replies page works, but often I see none. It was set in peakd to automatically select the node (was using hive.blog), but when I just tried manually selecting some it is still not consistent. Mind you, just now them came up straight away.
It is good to see various things being thought about as well as being worked on. Hive needs to have more value to people as a platform. As a social platform I don't believe there is much to compete with it, but I am sure others will come along and given the small size of our community we could be overtaken. We have to keep pushing to grow and a firm foundation will help.
Thanks again.