I think Daylight Saving Time is great! And the extension of it to weeks earlier in the spring and weeks later in the fall made it even better.
I remember the arab oil embargo and its effects. I was out in total darkness scraping my car off before going to work or school (I was doing both). And it would re-freeze on the glass on one end before I could finish the other end. And yes, I had the engine running. The early morning hours before dawn are tough in a northern environment. Not at all like evenings, which follow the heat (even if there seems little of it) of the day. Being at the absolute bottom of the thermal cycle is awful.
Little kids were standing on the sides of roads in total darkness waiting for school buses. Getting to work or school became more of a challenge, beyond what a normal winter would do. For school bus drivers too, who then had to get up disproportionately earlier. Fighting snowy icy roads in daylight is one thing, at night is another. When the weather was bad, we could choose not to go out in the evening. When they went to year-round DST, we had no choice, had to be at work or school in the "morning" by the time specified.
UTC for everyone? What? So every discrete location on the globe would have to decide how they would overlay their daily activity "clock" that needs to be synchronized with others in their area, onto UTC? Good luck with that! We can't agree on almost everything! And the whole concept of daily time repeatable across locations disappears! Think about it! Maybe that should be the plot for one of T-Al's books - I'd list it in the Sci-Fi Horror section.