node.getRevisionCreationTime equivalent in views
I found the answer eventually:

The crucial thing to do was to built the query starting with content revisions rather content. Rather unintuitively - creating a relationship the other way around does NOT get you to where you need to get in this situation!

To create a view listing the node's title, creation date, changed date, first publication, and publication date (the creation date of the current revision, follow these steps, and then add/remove as required:


Create a view showing content revisions of type all as follows, creating a page for easier review:

Remove the field "Content revision: Changed (Changed)" as this is not what we are interested in.
Add a relationship to Content as seen in the screenshot below:

This is one of the #DrupalWTF moments - where's the crucial documentation that allows me to select the correct relationship!?
There are apparently two RDBMS foreign key relationships you can use to join revisions and content: 

a. Via content revision foreign key to the id of the node this revision belongs to - this is the first content relationship, and

b. Via revision id referenced as foreign key from the content table as current node - this is the second content relationship shown above in the screenshot.


For whatever reason you cannot reach the creation date of a revision when joining via the first content relationship, #Drupal, #WTF?

Require the relationship for all results, and change the administrative title if you wish:



Add a filter criterion to show only blog posts
The relationship shows revisions for all content types, so we need to filter for content type blog post (Yours may be different). This is pretty straightforward, see the following screenshots:

a. Select the filter criterion:


b. Configure the filter:

Add the various date related fields
This is repetitive; to add the fields select them all in the "Add field" form, and configure them all the same way:


(Content) Authored on,
(Content) Changed,
(Content) Published on,
(Content revision) Revision create time



Here are the screenshots:

and


Et voila, all fields present as required.

Now you (I) can go to town for formatting and sorting.