[touchpadder]

There's nothing ambiguous when the epoch is known and the previous one is long gone. So you're confused about restarting a timer every 50 years, ok.

It's not true that it's much simpler to work with two 32bit words for a date than working with simply restarted clock. Basic arithmetics cannot be used reliably so every operation must go through a library like i.e. bigint used to require. This complicates the system and the goal of having a reliable 32bit date format in the future is for simplicity.