I agree that date conversion is a real problem for S2, especially in multi lingual applications.
We¹ve had to implement our own converter which either looks for a format value with the date string or picks up a list of default prioritised date formats and tries each one successively until success or failure with all. Ideally it would be good if we could configure S2 out of the box (so to speak) to perform the same functionality. By that I mean that in struts.xml or by convention file you could specify locale or a comma separated list of date formats to try for both short (date only) and long (date and time) values. Z.