It could have easily been a lot worse. It's a quirk of geography that the part of the world exactly 180 degrees from London, which just happened to be the capital of the world when the human race got around to setting up sensible time zones, happens to be a north-so-south slice of mostly unpopulated ocean, where only a few minor islands need to worry about this kind of thing.

Heck, there are a lot of possible globes where there's no sensible place to put an international date line at all... every north-south slice goes through a populated landmass.