Would there be ramifications to changing the code to reject a newly published chain if the lowest height block is 24 hours older than the highest published block?
Nope. This modification changes actually nothing, because attacker won't publish his chain during the generation time. It would affect you only if you are honest user with the wrong clock settings. That's much worse than checkpoints, because it provides a false sense of security.
but it strikes me as just another form of checkpoints, which is what NVC and PPC are using.
Again... Don't listen to checkpointism adepts ever.

The main purpose of checkpoints is not a chain control, a block chain
must be able to control itself. The main checkpoints purpose is to protect users against the compromised ISPs and enable some low-level signature checking optimizations. Checkpoints could be disabled or removed entirely and chain has to be able to continue working as usual.
second question - regarding bitcoin knowing the difference between a diff1 and diff2 block but YAC does not - could you elaborate on this Balthazar? What is YAC missing?
YAC is missing the block trust calculation.
BTC calculates chain work as a function of difficulty and chain length;
PPC calculates chain trust as a function of PoS difficulty and chain length;
NVC calculates chain trust as a function of PoW and PoS difficulties and chain length;
YAC doesn't perform any calculations, all blocks has the same trust and chain trust depends only on chain length.
But actual reason of the problem and all those "fixes" is that YAC tries to use PoS:PoW ratio which wasn't foreseen in the original design.