afaik we don't return DateTime objects for the normal "timestamp" field either. My usecase is parsing the contents of the x-death header from dead-lettered messages. x-death contains gets a copy of the original headers, so I would not think it a good idea to let these have a different format than the others. amqp timestamps are second precision only, anyway.

Maybe we should switch to DateTime objects everywhere we deal with timestamps for the next major release? I'm trying to lobby this patch here into the current mainline, since I client needs this and they can't wait for our next major release.