The date type field in S&F seems allow only a year drop down select form element. You can sort by date, but cannot group them in any way (it is not possible to add a header for each year for example). At least, you cannot do this easily. With the shortcode results method, you can have results.php file that you can edit. As long as the posts were already sorted by date, it WOULD be possible (not by us) to write PHP code to extract the year from the date and compare this to the previous post, and make a new heading if it had changed.

You COULD also have a list of years in a column where the links in them had the necessary code in to send the chosen year to the results. Again, not something we would do for you.