As discussed in PICARD-2712 some users might want to store values in the date tags that don't confirm to the YYYY-MM-DD, YYYY-MM or YYYY format used by Picard and MusicBrainz.

An option could be added to disable this behavior for APE and Vorbis tags, which are essentially free form. It is still highly recommended for the user to follow the above format however, as other formats have a stricter definition of the saved data.