I desperately need either a simpler version of subtasks or more detail on checklist items to support reporting, planning, and consolidating communication.

When I've used subtasks to assign specific responsibilities of an overall task, the result was communication spread across so many different places and a lot of confusion. As a workaround, I've had to rely on custom fields in order to give each individual a due date, a status dropdown, and time estimate field so that I can visualize their capacity and plan out the steps leading up to each activity. The custom dates are incredibly hard to automate so they require manual adjustments when due dates change, and the dashboards have had an ongoing filtering issue that does not seem likely to be resolved any time soon which prevent me from being able to filter by the custom status dropdowns and the custom time estimate values.