You’ve identified two areas of in need of improvement. To start, it is a known issue that ‘Timestamp’ fields do not return the time in addition to the date in Specify 7. This is part of a larger problem where Specify 7 does not support “time” functionality.
The second issue is a great point and something that we had not previously considered to my knowledge.
In the database, Specify stores the dates as 1/1/YYYY when only the year is known and indicated to Specify 6 that the 1s should be ignored based on the DateFieldPrecision value (for precise dates). Specify 7 has not had this logic implemented, therefore you are seeing the issue you described:
I think you’re absolutely right that some users may rely on the month and/or day fields being blank for their queries, reports, labels, etc.
Thank you again for taking the time to share these points with us! I hope these are relatively easy to solve as well.