The answer to your question is no, nobody has done this yetused persistence to improve the algorithmic efficiency of computing differentials, although it is an interesting idea and might be taken up in the future. In factof course the flowrelationship between persistence intervals of ideas has gonea filtration and various terms in the opposite direction, with attempts being made to useits Leray spectral sequences for parallelizing persistence computations (seesequence have been here for one example)described rather explicitly by Basu and Parida.
Here's an elementary observation: as mentioned in that article by Carlsson and Zomorodian, every sequence of $k$-modules admits a straightforward reinterpretation as a graded $k[t]$-module where $t$ acts by moving things forward one step along the grading. The existence of a persistence barcode relies crucially on the structure theorem for graded modules over graded PIDs. Since $k[t]$ is a PID only when $k$ is a field, relying on persistence will not solve any extension problems for you when you try to compute differentials -- all your $E_{\bullet,\bullet}^\bullet$s will have to be vector spaces already.