Ilovejdd - sadly this is calibre's fault, and nothing I can do about it from a plugin perspective. Calibre for the most part completely ignores the published dates returned from the plugins and instead uses a date from Worldcat associated with the isbn pool the book is in. And like you it has been my experience that the Worldcat data is utterly crap. It frustrates the heck out of me when I have lovely data possible from Goodreads or Fantastic Fiction or whoever and instead end up with a date wildly in the past or way too recent. That is why there is for instance a feature in Quality Check that reports series that have published dates out of order to pick some of them up, but that doesn't help with standalone novels...
Kovid has said he will accept a patch but with my Sigil work I have no time to do it. An option (or just default behaviour) to only use the Worldcat date if it gets no date from a metadata plugin would be a huge improvement in metadata quality. Perhaps Kovid will take pity if he spots this and do it in one if those 5 minute build down times he has...
