I agree - UTC is the way to go. The point of the example was to illustrate how simple could be detrimental to a significant portion of your userbase. How about

I agree - UTC is the way to go. The point of the example was to illustrate how simple could be detrimental to a significant portion of your userbase. How about another example? You're building an android application. Let's pretend there's an API in the latest version of Android that reduces a dozen lines of code down to one function call - ShinyNewMethod(). You can use that ShinyNewMethod() call. It's certainly simpler. But the vast majority of android devices in use are not running the latest OS. So the NewShinyMethod(), while being simple, will cause your app to not work for them. Hopefully the framework designers figured a way to have this auto-reverse engineer for older devices, but that's not always a guarantee.