I would love to have a toggle in the settings to switch to the Original Publication Date/Year for the mobile list and card views, as well as statistics.
Even better would be a date option with logic to use the original date when present and the current publication date when the original date is missing.
Whichever option, in most cases, I’m far more interested in the date a book originally came out than in the date my particular edition was released when looking at my collection as a whole.
This idea exists on our ideas list, but never made the cut so far, I’ve added this topic to it.
I think this might become very confusing to be honest (and then we’d have to like work with icons to make it more clear or something).
note: when you sort by Original Publication Date, it will actually show the original publication date in your list view on mobile.
I don’t see how the conditional date would be too confusing. Same basic principle as using the sort name when present and the regular name when no sort name is present.