[ShroudedNight]

> It's by having a single value represent the time

I have limited experience dealing with human originated time references, but from my encounters, the various idiosyncratic forms of date storage often seem to arise out of an aversion to commit to well defined intervals of uncertainty / margins of error. Coercing people of limited mental bandwidth or interest beyond immediate gratification to go through the pain of constricting their mental models to time_t levels of precision seems to basically be a non-starter.