I'm exactly of this opinion, it's better for us (programmers/admins/etc) to deal with some level of breakage now (gigantic as it may be), than for actual users to deal with breakage with their future dates.
Bingo. We have the option of recompiling with an older version of glibc while we work out the bugs. Our users won't have the option of running our code in 2037 when the epoch arrives.