Filters with year or year and month not working right.

It seems that filtering on a date stored as a string in views with Drupal 7 is not functional. It basically treats the filter as a string so you can't filter on a date based context. I looked at the function that does the dirty work date_views_convert to make this happen it's fairly complicated and looks like it will take quite a lot to get it back to a functional state. Basically the function converts every single string in the database into a datetime this seems inefficient and kind of messy and I'm not even sure if this will be possible with Drupal 7.