Remember when I said concluding accelerating expansion from red shifts may be unreliable because it requires accurately understanding their cause? It should be clear from that I find this theory far more appealingly plausible than conceiving a wholly new but otherwise undetectable force to account for what may simply be an observer artifact. Not that that makes either theory valid, hence people far more knowledgeable than I are well paid to investigate the legitimacy of both, while keeping their eyes open for even more likely explanations.

That said, and with the extent of my ignorance in mind, I would not be so sure the "death of time" (a catchphrase whose ubiquity you must gleefully anticipate... ) is unnoticeable. Everyone over 30 has noticed, and for far longer than a decade, that time seems to pass ever more quickly with age. I have been struck by the possibility that might be more than just perception since first learning of Hawkings comparison of the Big Bang to an inverted black hole. It is hard to see Senovilla and companys theory as anything but the universe itself offering positive evidence. The most annoying part would be that everything existing is, by definition, part of the universe, so nowhere would be immune from the observer effect. That would likely preclude both proving apparent acceleration is but a product of the universes age as well as determining that age. We could be near the start, end or middle of a Big Bang OR Crunch with no way of knowing which, because the very metric we use to find the answer (time) is itself constantly altered.

Of course, reducing time to simply another physical dimension largely invalidates such concepts anyway. The universes variable three dimensional shape would then not be so variable at all, but simply a function of its four dimensional shape. When we move from the top to the bottom of a champagne bottle we do not say it shrank or changed shape; it remains the same size and shape as ever, but is simply wider at the bottom than at the top. The real question is more of metaphysics than physics: Is change itself an artifact? Put another way, since we measure change by time, is saying time is changing a meaningless statement? Ascribing it to yet higher physical dimensions would only postpone (and complicate) the problem. The only logical solution I can see is an infinite number of physical dimensions, spawned by the phenomenon of change itself.

At that point we have obviously abandoned purely natural philosophy as inherently and hopelessly subjective. Note that, having accepted your stated qualifier two decades ago, I feel completely entitled to engage in the philosophizing against which you cautioned.