[ajrichardson]

I'm sympathetic to this idea, but it does introduce some logic problems as you indicate. When I was part of a team developing a project management app years ago, we had different tools for drawing group bars vs task bars for exactly this reason. That way we didn't have to have groups only come into existence after the sub-tasks had been created.

Our main reason for doing it was for collaboration - the project manager is not going to know all the sub-tasks, but the discipline leads will fill those in. But putting the group in meant blocking out time for it, and then someone else could fill in the details. The difference with our scheme was that groups could be given durations even if they didn't have tasks yet - they were not necessarily shrink-to-fit.

Adam