What exactly is "original release date" and why is it almost always wrong?

[DDPS]

4 years later, what does everybody in this thread think about this?

Infer "Original Release Dates" from "Release Dates"

As I have discussed elsewhere on these forums, I’ve spent years (maybe decades?) applying appropriate release dates to all of my ~52,000 tracks (most pertinent to hundreds of compilations I have) so that I can do magic with those dates creating playlists that are year-related. This all started before “Original Release Date” was a widely-used tag in tag editing software. If I were starting all over again, I would use this field as well as Release Date (which still sees more widespread support ac…