One could also let the user specify which date format they are using. It may even have field escapes to build a format like the date(1) command. Yet another option is to allow for year, month, and day arguments (-fromday -frommonth -fromyear -tomonth -today -toyear). One could also document ISO 8601 dates are taken by the program and reject anything that isn't one. There might be a Unix epoch timestamp option.

I find it odd that you would call using '-' as a separator an error. ISO 8601 demands it. The standard also works with week numbers and day-of-year numbers which can be quite handy sometimes. When writing new software which doesn't have to deal with legacy formats, I generally try to use a standard. If you're going to force a particular format, don't use one that encourages localization nightmares.