I also have no objection anymore to removing the square brackets if it is done entirely consistently throughout the article; in the citations, however, the brackets may still be needed so that the dates are bolded as the 2008-09-09 style is.  As one who had to restore all the square brackets, which took a lot of time, I will not be the editor who removes them.  (There are square brackets around years in some of the charts created by other editors; I just helped to develop the charts, following their prevailing format.  Please do not alter (and thus try to maintain) the prevailing citation format; it takes forever to code those citations.