If you think that this method could be useful for astronomy in the future, can you point to astronomical controversies in the past that it would have helped with?

You can't resolve debates unless there are actual competing theories. The main problem with dark matter is that people don't have theories precise enough to compare. When there are competing theories, astronomy appears to me pretty good at isolating the relevant data and comparing the theories.

And I imagine that is why you are working on linguistics, not astronomy. Astronomy has a solid grounding that allows it to process and isolate data, while a lot of linguistic claims require agreement on labeling before they can be assessed, making it easy for people to hide behind subjective labeling.