> you can't dumb down the complexities of the real world just because it'll make some engineers happier

Except that everything in science and engineering is about dumbing down the complexities of the real world so that it makes more sense to us.

That's not the issue, the issue is putting the complexity in the right place. There is immense value in having a simple, unambiguous measure of absolute time and date but because a few powerful scientists and engineers decided that very silly anal retentive issues were more important than fundamental ones we can't have that. Creating a map between absolute time and local dates and relative times is much easier than scattering the diffs relative to local time through every part of the system.