Kendo comes through again. Had an issue with international dates and after trying a bunch of different data manipulations it turns out Kendo already has a date parser that does everything I need including checking if a string of random lettters or numbers are a valid date. The code freeze has been set and I had no issues upon review of the site in sandbox. I found a couple of places where I could have done things better and those will be addressed in the patch but my content is QA approved and in the hands of the users to test.