Eminence helped slow down science down enough to be digested throughout the community in the pre-internet era. Eminence was a proxy for a level-0 filter on good science.

As the world moves to become more connected than ever, eminence is too slow and inefficient. Hopefully we can come out of this with evidence as the new king and not some other proxy. We're gonna have to make some changes to get there. (Publication bias, replication prejudice, preregistration, better statistics, reporting accuracy...)

I really like your thinking and believe that there is an eminent truth behind it. Such that loose social connectedness naturally procreates the development of such proxies as a form of stabilization mechanism.

What I'd really like to understand and see visualized are the non-linear social dynamics presented in manifold theory.