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.