Ben, IIUC your proposal is very similar to what I wrote above, except that I would have added the "virtual" aspect to TIME field itself. But in the end, it seems we can have our cake and eat it too: we can implement this with a channel filter and have the resulting flexibility, while at the same time treating the ".TIME" part of the PV name as special syntax that creates a channel filter (which is already the case for "[n]" for arrays or "$" for long strings).
Ben, IIUC your proposal is very similar to what I wrote above, except that I would have added the "virtual" aspect to TIME field itself. But in the end, it seems we can have our cake and eat it too: we can implement this with a channel filter and have the resulting flexibility, while at the same time treating the ".TIME" part of the PV name as special syntax that creates a channel filter (which is already the case for "[n]" for arrays or "$" for long strings).