I got sick of the annoying date display bug, and so dug through the default theme files looking for specific references to date formats. And there were many …
I found that, instead of using the WordPress the_date() function, there were many calls to the_time('l, F jS, Y'), which forces a specific date format. If you replace instances of the_time('l, F jS, Y') with the_date(), your date and time format set in the Options panel will work as expected.
How hard was that? Not very. How easy would it be to be modified in the default template?