Michael,

I think this is a great idea.

If you're trying to work around this in the meantime, I currently deal with this issue in one of 2-ways.

1. Creating a hidden date field on my forms with a default value of now. I then use some javascript to populate a hidden text field that will contain the year. Example below. 

$(document).ready(function() {
  updateYear();
});

function updateYear() {
  sourceField = $('[attr="date"] input');
  sourceValue = sourceField.val();
  targetField = $('[attr="year"] input');
  targetValue = (new Date(sourceValue)).getFullYear();
  targetField.val(targetValue);
}

2. After saving to the repository, I invoke a workflow that adjusts the name, path, etc. as needed using the current date. Here's an example of the Assign Token task using the global Date variable.