just a minor inconvenience
I agree in practice but strongly disagree in principle. Lightroom should make hard things easy, and easy things trivial. There's a finesse to it that Lightroom — which I greatly admire and find worth more than it costs — lacks in enough places that I think Adobe is uncaring. This strikes me as a "version 2" issue — not a version six one.
Are there any other Smart Collections that require the work-around of being updated yearly? Are there other Smart Collections which can be simply stated that require separate rules for every year?
Date of year, Day of week, and even time of day should be in-built references. It's a database. These data are useful and basic. It should be trivial to group all photos I've taken between five and six o'clock in the winter in the Dakotas.
Simple example:
All photos taken on New Years Eve.
Complex example (actually difficult):
All photos taken in the hour before sunset (generalized: solar time of day for each photo {itself location dependent}, in addition to time separated from the date-time stamp).
The simple stuff should be completely covered by Lightroom.