I make my generic and standard comment that RM and all other genealogy software need to separate the way data is stored from the way data is displayed. And the way data is displayed needs to have lots of options and to be under user control. Sadly, almost no genealogy software follows this advice.
In the case of dates, genealogy software needs to accommodate various American and international standards, various punctuation (dots vs. dashes vs. slashes), various ways to display approximate date and date range (before, after, between, about, ca., etc.), quarterly dates, Quaker dates, dates in various languages (e.g., for names of months in French or English or German or whatever), pre and post Gregorian dates, various orderings for the day-month-year, full months vs.abbreviated months, and probably lots of other variations on displaying dates that I'm not thinking of right now.
If date storage and date display could be separated in this fashion, it should be possible to have very good interchange of date data between different genealogy software and each user could still display dates in the style and language that would meet their needs. Of course, I'm assuming that the standard for storing date data would be a good quality and comprehensive standard and wouldn't be totally horrible the way the current place name standard is totally horrible.
Jerry