An interesting prospective project for a technically minded musician would be would be to find an automated way to "correct" the surviving corpus of Welte-Mignon[1] recordings. They were designed to capture the small nuances of performances (such as dynamics), and a large number of historically important musicians made recorded performances in this medium before the era of sound recording. In my strongly-held opinion, the rolls were marked in an uneven and imprecise way, making direct playback on anything but the original recording apparatus inaccurate. A common trait of modern renderings of these rolls as sound recordings (as found on CD or on Youtube) is an unevenness of tempo and a seeming lack of synchronization of voices (really piano keys). However, the mechanical quirks and imprecision in the recording apparatus must be regular enough to allow for a more accurate version of the performances to be reconstructed, without relying on unduly many aesthetic assumptions.
I learned about this a few years ago and was delighted to hear some actual performances by Debussy of his own pieces. I was unimpressed by the quality of the recordings, though (via replaying on a restored mechanism) so it's great to get a MIDI version now!
How did the Welte-Mignon actually work? It seems almost miraculous that the dynamics can be captured on a piano roll and replayed successfully. Not perfectly, as you say, but pretty damn close.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welte-Mignon