A fork for the time-zone database?

People don't know their timezone names, and the short names like EST or MST are ambiguous. It seems like an accessibility problem, people don't want to say they are UTC+10, and that alone does not cover daylight savings, and extended version strings with the daylight saving changeover points do not cover historical dates before daylight savings being introduced, or changes to when it takes effect/ends. For example Sydney changed daylight savings specifically for the 2000 Olympics, but went back to normal afterwards.
Picking from a map helps by giving people a visual reference, but some people are also very bad at maps.

I guess the human-interface and the tzdb problems are technically independent, in that tzdb could ship with no zone names and just have a whole bunch of zones given SHA codes, with parent SHAs to cover historical changes - a bit like git branches. The human timezone names could just be tag-like references to these SHA codes, but whoever maintains this list of tags will face a similar problem of what names to include and what to exclude. And people would probably want it shared for consistency across apps and OSes, you wouldn't really want each library/language or OS to re-implement it differently.