You know who I haven't seen posts from in a while?
The canine from Cardiff...

Sample code that people post in articles and the like is almost never going to be "production ready."  It's simply there so that someone can see the *how* of doing...

Ugh.  A requirement that recently popped up:  "Thou must enable FIPS 140-2 cryptography!"
OK, sure, no probl...
OK, it's set to disabled by GPO and I can't change it.
"Thou...

I was told it runs faster when it's written like this:
select ob1.name, ix1.name, ic1.index_column_id from sys.objects ob1 inner join sys.indexes ix1 on ix1.object_id = ob1.object_id inner join...

As every database is different, you may need / want to update statistics more frequently.

From the sound of it, you're not hitting the threshold for an auto-update, but...

What does it say that, while I think I might know what the problem is, and I've already ginned up a solution and tested it, I'm not willing to post...

I suspect your problem is going to be in how your [DATE] field is stored.
Would I be correct in presuming that field is stored as either a DATE or...