I don't mean to invalidate your opinion, but I don't think using UTC
universally is actually all that bad. Each individual person just needs
to know their own personal UTC offset and then it's trivial to adjust.
In my opinion, when everyone uses their own local time zone it actually
makes things more difficult, since instead of applying a constant offset
I have to also adjust their time zone to UTC and then convert from UTC
to my time zone.
For example, I am one of those (rare) US/Mountain time zones, so I know
I just need to subtract 6 from any UTC time to get my local time (7
during DST).
Of course, what's "easy" is totally subjective. That's just my 2 cents.
I suppose if mutt were extensible in lua or lisp or whatever, I could
easily write my own function that handled the US timezones differently
from other ones, and that would solve most of my problems.
Have you looked into MuttLisp [1] at all? I haven't, so I'm not sure if
it's capable of solving your issue, but it might be worth a look.
Greg
[1]: http://www.mutt.org/doc/manual/#muttlisp