Change default date format?

[SFRailsback]

I think we should consider changing the default date format from MM/dd/yyyy to M/d/yyyy (and MM/dd to M/d, etc.). The MM/dd/yyyy seems to cause a runtime error when it encounters dates lacking leading zeros (like 7/5/2002 instead of 07/05/2002). Dates without zeros are extremely common, e.g., they are the standard in Excel. (And the runtime error statement is not extremely clear--took me a while to figure out the problem and clean up my code.)

Is there any disadvantage to making M/d the default?