'Simulated Badge Hunting?'
Azrael.
IMO, what you need to ask is "What does badge hunting mean to you?"
There's no central server so there's no inherent way to tell a client that you found a badge or take an appropriate action.
If you used existing technology to simulate badge hunting, you'd do something like Dyne was working on last fall for exploration badges - a bot whose purpose is to sit quietly, monitor the location of people, and send them a /tell when their computed location coincided with a badge location.
You have the problem of persistence at that point. How do you make a permanent record? It's not that it's difficult to do that, but more that you want to do it in a way that's simple and little or no work for the player to interact with. Ideally, you want it to be something the player can share with other players.
If a scripting engine is built into the client then you can get fancier; possibly activating whatever triggers already exist in the client to display badge award banners, and recording badges to a .ini file or a database file on the client.
If you're a "player" today, do you want any kind of badging experience you can get now, or do you want to wait for the tools to have it done "right", for values of "right" that most closely approximate the original CoH experience?
Do you want the identical badging experience you had with CoH or are you open to having new "badges" to explore for and collect?