More informative phylogenetic trees
Here's the issues with your well considered project:

1/ Temporal datasets to proportion trees: That's probably the most absent thing in species measurement. You'd need data sets of time for beetle species, for mammals, plants in millenia and million years. 90+% of that information is absent.

2/ Genetic proximity to arrange trees. Scientists publish their genome studies into the ToL project. There is lots of distance data to compare all animals.... Genetic distance doesn't graph easily because on the same tree, some distances can be 500 times longer than others. On a tree of 20 extant species, you will have branches 5mm long and 5 meters long, half the the species are on your screen and the other half are higher than the ceiling. It's best to represent them with another symbol, else interactive 3D trees where you can switch compact/large views and the tree zooms out crazily, it's illustrative and cool, else use a weighted proximity length which is 1+ similarity/50, that doesn't really work either. either way, I couldnt find a way of clearly displaying that info on the tree.

Phylogeny trees don't lend themselves well to being informatively measured. You start by thinking "Oh I could find a pretty way of doing that" then when you apply the datasets, your trees become uncontrollable and jumbled up because of exponential branch lengths.

I programmed phylogenetic trees based on the 81MB ToL tree of life project to represent many millions of species, to do 3D physics trees and HTTP lookups to provide wiki texts and images for all species. There is www.biostars.org a very kind and helpful bioinformatics forum for postgrads that do trees all day. 

There are many (dozens) of informative tree graphics programs coded by academics, to visualizw and analyzw species data, arranged into different trees and sorting through them.