Thats what you get for getting credit! :)
haha!
At least its understood why it was done this way. I find it humorous that its 2007 and there is no standard format for time, I mean in the sense of a "duh, of course its done this way" Like writing hello world :) Oh wait.......
I guess Allan's reply reveals that it's not 100% understood all around why it's done the way it is, but there were good motivations at least :)
The thing is there IS a standard format for time, which is the format that is being used here (the Z and -0000 type extensions are all part of ISO8601, which I believe is specified as the date format for XML-RPC). The problems here seem to be dealing with historical mistakes in how those standard dates were used in WordPress.
D