@Victor: With regards to getting a "date as datetime", that is another way to do it that I have also done in the past (and in fact it's how the new dateutil.utils.today() function is implemented: https://github.com/dateutil/dateutil/blob/master/dateutil/utils.py#L7), but it's still not particularly elegant and doesn't obviously convey what you want there.

And yes, I'm aware of timespec, I linked it in my original report (it was actually added in Python 3.6).