Some more info... I looked in the database and while the post_name column has the title-with-hyphens type entry (e.g., "so-i-went-to-traffic-school" for the example above), the guid column has a URL with yyyymmddhhmm in it instead. Mind you, I'm not sure whether that's because of the post_name in the xml file or because the last time I tried importing it, I had set wordpress to use that format.
Nonetheless, I'd really like the post_name to get the date string, so that I could set it to use the post_name for future posts.
Again, any help is most appreciated.