Give us some tools to work with field values

I am trying to work with date fields in PHP and it's quite difficult to do as AFAIK there aren't any functions in the Date API that allow a user to easily convert the field value arrays into DateObjects.

I see in date_formatter_process() there's a hefty chunk of code that parses out field data to get a DateObject

If I'd want to to something similar, I'd have to write at least this much code:

  $field = field_info_field("FIELD_DATE_NAME");
  foreach ($entity->FIELD_DATE_NAME[LANGUAGE_NONE] as $date) {
    $timezone = isset($date['timezone']) ? $date['timezone'] : '';
    $timezone = date_get_timezone($field['settings']['tz_handling'], $timezone);
    $timezone_db = date_get_timezone_db($field['settings']['tz_handling']);
    $db_format = date_type_format($field['type']);
    $thisValObj = new DateObject($date['value'], $timezone_db, $db_format);
  }

If the API provided field-related functions that gave us DateObjectsfrom entity fields, a lot of copy/pasting could be saved.

Is there already something like this in the API somewhere that I'm just not seeing?