It doesn't force today's date at all. The entire point of a date picker is you can pick any date. You can also type into the CC if you don't want to interact with the Date Picker. The format of any date will give you guidance on how to enter it.
Don't be mislead by the choice of Publish Date in my description - this is just a display name and doesn't get amended to always be 'today'. This will work with any xml data but some validation of requiring a valid date makes the solution more robust.
And my suggested method DOES need to be a date picker because that encourages the likelihood that a date/time is entered.
If you don't want to change date/time formats in the duplicate fields (as per your abc example in two cells) then you can ignore the Date Picker CC and read Greg's page here
Repeating Data (Populating Multiple Like Fields). I would recommend the CC method on this page though.