How about they fix the "feature" that rounds very long numbers off and causes all sorts of havoc in financial spreadsheets?

I just tried their examples in Libre Office Calc. Neither of them were automatically converted to dates.

You can tell it to detect numbers or dates when you paste in text or open a plain text .csv file, but by default it simply reads everything as text.

I don’t know what level dependence the scientific community has on Microsoft Excel, but they could have beat this problem with Calc.