I assume that you're talking to the fact that when updating tags from YADB you must update all tags or no tags. I mentioned this when I first started using MC too. It didn't, then, seem like there was much interest from the devs in changing this.
Upon finding this out, I elected to utilize another application. I ended up choosing one called Jaikoz, which accesses MusicBrainz and discogs for its metadata. It allows full customization over which fields will be updated. For the year thing specifically it works well, but has a few inherent flaws in that, if it thinks your track came from a "best of" album (for example) it will list the date of the best-of album rather than the original album. So if you're picky, like me, you'll have to manually keep an eye on the results that it returns. It is not free, but has free updates, and the developer seems to make pretty consistent updates and even made one for me so that the program would work with MC.
There are probably other programs that will do just as good a job for you, but this is the one that worked for me. Mp3Tag (free) might also be worth a look.
-JB