Realistically, for an old program like Excel, is it even possible to get bad-but-consistent behavior fixed? For example, I keep getting frustrated with teh bon

Realistically, for an old program like Excel, is it even possible to get bad-but-consistent behavior fixed? For example, I keep getting frustrated with teh bone-headed behavior when pasting dates in yyyy-MM-dd format into a blank spreadsheet and getting them mangled into an incoherent decimal number. But I'm assuming something like that has a historical reason and MS never wants to break backwards compatibility.