Paul has certainly generalized the argument about judgment Romans, but it wouldn’t be unreasonable to understand ‘tribulation and distress’ for the Jews in terms of AD 70, in which case there is some reason to construe judgment on the ‘Greek’ in similar fashion. We may still imagine that there is an implicit historical horizon to his view of the future. We also have to take into account the more apocalyptic narrative of 2 Thess.1-2, which I think makes much better sense as an account of judgment on an idolatrous paganism that persecuted the early church. It may be, though, that the more universal rhetoric of Romans is meant to encompass (or has the effect of encompassing) both the immediate judgment and the final judgment.

…you are trying to see how far this new reference point can go in explaining as many NT judgement passages as possible.

Very astute.

But it cannot mean that people die into non-existence and the result of the final judgement is merely continuation of that non-existence. The final judgement seems worse than that for those not in Christ.

You have made this point a couple of times without actually providing the textual evidence. You say: ‘it could be argued that the NT authors use images of death and destruction which are familiar to us now only as analogies to a judgement that is so terrible we can’t possibly comprehend it now’. Take a concrete example and show how this might be the case. Why would these authors use images of death and destruction for a torment after death. Was the ancient world unfamiliar with torture? Could they not have come up with images of conscious enduring pain? In the stories of the Maccabean martyrs who suffered excruciating pain because they refused to deny their ancestral faith, death is seen as an end to torment - though not, significantly, for Antiochus, who would suffer eternal torment comparable to the suffering that he had afflicted. It seems illogical to me that death and destruction would be used as analogies for the experience of pain.