>>In the case of the date format, the error is not happening now, it happend a long time ago, when a programmer decided to use a character date format that is not portable to other local settings. It is a technical debt that exsists and now got detected. The debt may be paid now or later. I believe a considerable time was already spent at this point in time, so time has already been lost may not be chargeable.
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>>The question is to create new debt, or to pay the debt now. The first option will very likey result in postponing the payment. It is like Italy with their new budget.
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>There's another solution, not too original, and you probably saw it many times: never pay the debt, just keep paying the interest.
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>That is, once you understand what was done in the quick and dirty style ten or fifteen years ago is not something you can wash. You can't even make new, because it's reflected in badly designed tables and, by now, few hundred places in reports, views and who knows where, which rely on things being as they are. So you just write what wrappers you can, pretty much like a mask on a scary face. You can replace a mask with a finer mask, but the face is beyond help - you should replace the whole head, and you can't.

That is true. In several places you have to decide to go with a wrapper because there is not enough urgency and time to redesign. But you need to be careful, because over time you may loose too much time. If it is an important flagship application that the company depends on I will put more effort into it.