There was another person from another forum - the battlereports/nohunters community (I think it was the user known was WilliamWC3), who had developed a program named SuperView, which you could use to look at data from replays, in an extremely rudimentary way. This program did not count actions for you, but it listed whenever a player had done something. I had this program, but had not really used it for anything - it gave you the raw data from a replay file, but it basically wasn't comprehensive at all.
After the world dream tour scandal, where ilnp (dudey) had gotten a korean progamer to play for him (oversky), and dudey said it was himself playing, nazgul approached me and asked if I could maybe try to use this program to see if dudey's raw data input from the WDT games looked similarly to how the raw data input from other games looked.
I then spent a decent amount of time counting individual actions from two different replays, and saw that the frequency WDT-dudey did stuff was about 2.5 times the frequency of regular-dudey. While this operated in 40 second frequencies rather than full minutes, this was essentially the first time, to my knowledge, that anyone used replay data to count how fast someone was playing.