Thus the stars may be younger than they appear. The time axis would be dented too. Thanks for your insightful response. I haven't developed this idea nearly enough to hang actual numbers on it. I don't understand why you say that the boundaries between domains would be blurry and fuzzy.
Cosmic strings are unnecessary and unobserved.
This is the era of the Higgs fields in a stable form. It is characterized by continuation of thermodynamic cooling and gravitationally limited expansion. I'm tempted to use crystallization as an analogy for inflation, but do so guardedly. When a super-saturated solution crystallizes, such as sugar in hot water on a glass plate, domains appear. Each domain grows radially until the domains touch, at which time, the growth in that direction stops.