It would also cause people to get an advantage by waking up at some ungodly hour, thereby causing college students to lose all the time.

One solution I've been thinking of for this is that any new units created on a certain day don't show up on everyone else's screen until ater the Daily Cycle runs. Everyone is at the same disadvantage for responding to unit spawns, no matter when those units are created.
Think of this as the time lag between the creation of units and your intelligence services / satellites finding out about them.