Blog entries in the future => best replacement for badly integrated "calendar plugin" ?

After "Backdate blog entries" (CONF-1711) was created, a lot of people mentioned the possibility to create blog posts in the future.

Considering we have many problems with the "calendar plugin", which does not allow easy SQL parsing or reporting plugin interoperability, we'd like to use the blog posts from a certain space as an agenda for events, thus allowing to report all events between some date ranges and display them as we like, and get rid of the calendar plugin.

We really need this to get a proper rendering of a calendar.