[scruple]

> I'm not sure what the point is.

Believe me, I'm having the same reaction right now.

> The most recent time zone selection I made was installing OpenBSD on a new laptop yesterday. That had me choose a proper time zone name.

If you don't understand the difference between you selecting "America/Los_Angeles" in an OpenBSD installation and the average user being confronted with a list of country/city names vs. a timezone name and offset then I feel sorry for your users.

[greggyb]

Luckily, I get to avoid building time zone UIs in my day job.

If I were to put it in a UI, I'd try to have locally understandable time zones as the labels, without incorrect offsets. I'd also probably try to give a better than a drop down selection of multiple dozens of options. I might not succeed, in which case I'd fall back to some lowest common denominator based on a survey of popular services. In any event, I agree with you that it is not a high priority for me, and would not be in any app I might develop.