Fucking Indiana was probably the source of 90% of your pain. Time zones and DST were a country free for all there until the mid 2000s IIRC. State couldn’t decide if it wanted to be central time or eastern so everyone got to decide on their own.
Oh I blamed everyone, from USPS and the county level politicians - to the astrologists screwing around with the tz database... Also, and I hope this doesn't offend any surviving perl monks, having only perl at my disposal made it that much more unpleasant. I never touched perl after that project wound down, but I do wonder to what degree that experience influenced my subsequent shift to porting AIX software...
Indiana was certainly involved. I'm sure I've got a copy of a backup of a copy that would contain those old scripts, but I'm no joke starting to get a little upset just thinking about how much time was needlessly wasted on such a stupid problem.