Sounds like a nifty plan, dear Kevmo. The only problem I see is we can’t truncate the universe to fit the categories of our present understanding without falsifying the report we get from observation of what is real, outside our minds.
***My problem with using SPace*Time is that Matter is a part of space, and multiplying it out to space*time & manipulating it just makes it more of a fancy mathematical trick. Matter is moving faster than the speed of light if it is a part of space*time during that inflationary period. So, yes, maybe I’m truncating, but it’s better than handwaving with smoke & mirrors.
My suspicion is that during the initial inflationary period, matter had not yet "congealed" into anything that we today could even recognize as "matter." First we need to "wait for" quark "confinement" to be able to speak about the thing we call "matter." That is, stuff with mass. And that took "a while"....
What is the criterion of your distinction between "faster" and "slower" in the immeasurable initial "no time, no space" of the earliest universe [immeasurable, since the initial conditions fall short of description in terms of Plank length and Planck time — the tiniest incremental measures of space and time that the human mind is capable of registering]?
Here's an interesting problem. For much of human history, the concept of "absolute space" has been dominant. That is, "space" is regarded as a pre-existing space, just waiting to be filled by matter as it comes along.
Modern physical cosmology has pretty much refuted that possibility, finding that both space and time are created from the universal expansion primordially driven by the big bang, on an ongoing basis. That is, space and time do not precede materiality, but are contemporaneous with its emergence.
To put it crudely, as new "stuff" emerges, space is created to accommodate it. And this is a process that is described temporally by human beings.
Hence Einsteins's unification of space and time.
I'm sure I'm missing a whole lot of the details. But I do think I have sound reasons for rejecting the idea of "absolute space."
The theory of "absolute space" cannot account for cosmic inflation.