(Little cleanup...)
Bug fixed (only active with incompatible_improvements set to 2.3.22 or higher): When a date/time/date-time value was put into the JSP page scope as an attribute (via #global or via the JSP PageContext API) and later read back with the JSP PageContext API (typically in a custom JSP tag), it may come back as a freemarker.template.SimpleDate object, rather than as a java.util.Date. (This has occurred if the value was created directly in FTL, or if you are using DefaultObjectWrapper, not pure BeansWrapper. The origin of the problem is that FTL had no native date/time/date-time type when the JSP taglib extension was written; FTL numbers, strings and booleans were always transformed back to plain Java types. It's highly unlikely that something expects the presence of this oversight.)