IIRC, Timezones became a big problem with us because different platforms (windows, macosx, linux) reacted differently depending on the underlying binary. Some platforms would result in thrown exceptions and some would result in acceptable defaults. I'd be hesitant to change this as @stuartf wrote it during the process of doing cross-platform testing on the dev. environment.

ping @stuartf , do you recall this throwing exceptions in some environments?