>
> b) "Creation date" is just a short-term hack.
>

I agree, but we need things to be easy in the short term as well as the
long term :)

The long term solution is clearly to have the 12 word seed be an encryption
key for a wallet backup with all associated metadata. We're heading in that
direction one step at a time. Unfortunately it will take time for wallets
to start working this way, and all the pieces to fall into place. Restoring
from the block chain will be a semi regular operation for users until then.

WRT version number I have no real strong feelings about this. But
representing short pieces of binary data as words is so convenient, it
seems likely that it could be similar to addresses: people find other uses
for this mechanism beyond just storing a raw private key. Bitcoin addresses
have versions and that's proven to be useful several times, even though in
theory an address is "just" a hash of a pubkey.