And some folks have tried to take advantage of that one way and another -- I think that at one time it may have been advantageous for miners to have their clocks set differently from the rest of the network or something a bit crazy like that.
There hasn't ever been such a situation in Bitcoin. Though I believe some altcoins may have self destructed based on trying to "fix" timestamps as you've outlined.
Glad to hear it. :-) As I said, I wasn't sure. Sorry to be passing on rumors.
Also, it's good to know that I need to pay close attention when I'm doing things that depend closely on time in some altcoin code I'm working on. I'm considering it completely reasonable that two computers whose clocks disagree by more than about ten seconds should not be able to peer with one another. And if you do get a 'cannot peer due to time difference' error that should trigger a query to public nntp servers to check the offset from system time.