I think this is just putting a band-aid on the fundamental problem: racing is a distinct area of Zwift that people opt to take part in. It’s a unique feature of the platform (as a massive multi-user “game”). Why are we re-inventing the wheel of race categories, particularly on a metric that is so one-dimensional and actually not really reflective of anything to do with racing (other than perhaps the singular discipline of an individual time trial)?
I’d just jump straight to rankings / formal race categories: Formal Race Category System - #2 by Christopher_Grote_B
We’re talking about an online platform that already has the information necessary to come up with the rankings. It would be trivial to calculate them: they’d just need to decide the algorithm to base them on (eg. is it purely podium finishes, or does it depend on the race (some more difficult than others?), who else is participating in the race (and their rankings), etc)
But honestly, even the most complex approach (depends on the race and who else is participating and the rankings and finishing place of all those other riders relative to yourself) is basically just PageRank, which Google demonstrated was effective at internet scale (Zwift data is what, 0.0000000000000000001% of that size?), and this was ~20 years ago.
Only remaining question then would be how do people start, given that everyone who hasn’t raced would start with no points (and thus no ranking). The real world solves that with the lowest category of racing: it’s open to all (that haven’t qualified-out, though if you go the PageRank approach above even if people have qualified out it’s actually better that they’re in your race even if they beat you as you’ll get more points competing against them) and those that stick with it and have some skill will quickly qualify out to higher categories.