Robbie,
It's extraordinarily hard to answer the question, "Tell me everything about how you use OmniFocus?" People complain about the price of OF. At a reasonable, professional, hourly rate, the telling would cost in the thousands of dollars.
That said, I'm foolish enough that I'm seriously considering starting a blog on the subject. Stay tuned.
To your specific questions:
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Originally Posted by Robbie1702
1) How to handle the absence of multiple contexts (i.e. people + place + essential tool like Mac) & priorities (as high/med/low tags in Things) in OF? - Replacing the Context bar with tags/metadata would allow for all these features.
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I just pick the context that seems most important. Very few of my tasks require multiple resources in such a way that it's an issue. If I need to make sure that I bring together people in a place with specific tools, then the action is to schedule a meeting and my meeting preparation includes identifying what to bring to the meeting. Life moves too quickly for me to notice that I happened to run into Alice in the lab while I'm carrying my MBP. I just don't care to slice my contexts that thinly. If I did, I would effectively have an exponential number of contexts (the cross-product of people, places, and resources) and would be constantly changing between them.
Only my high priority projects are active in OmniFocus. Everything else is on-hold or in a separate OmniOutliner file. I use ordering of projects in Planning Mode to keep the most important of the projects at the top of the list. I use flags to mark the projects that support my monthly goals. Those projects also have their review intervals set for daily reviews. I don't feel a need for priorities beyond that in OF. (I accept that others do, but that wasn't the question.)
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2) How does anyone using OmniFocus deal with not being able to put single actions on hold? - The lack of this feature just blows my mind whenever I try to use my workflow on a daily basis. There simply are single actions in my projects I want to put on hold, but there just seems to be no way to do so...!
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I just set a future start date on the task and move on, or else delete the task. When the start date roles around, I push the start date ahead if I still want the task to be on-hold. More often than not, circumstances have changed by the start date and I'm willing to delete the task. I also have a few single action lists set to on-hold. I'll sometimes move single actions there, but practically speaking actions go to those lists to die.
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3) Waiting for stuff to be done by others. - I just want to be able to mark single actions with a tag that says "waiting". That way I could just include that tag in a perspective filter (like in Things) and see all my 'waiting for"s without altering their context or place within my folder structure.
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I just create a task like "From Alice, completed TPS reports" and give it a Waiting For context and perhaps a future start date. There's no other appropriate context for that task. My only action is to wait. If the start date rolls around and Alice hasn't gotten back to me, then I have a new task, "Remind Alice about TPS reports". (Or more often than not, I use the two-minute rule and fire off an email reminder. In that case I push the start date on the "From Alice" task off for a couple of days.) I catch Waiting For tasks with start dates in my morning tickler review. I catch other Waiting For tasks in my weekly review.
I wrote a bit more about agendas and waiting-fors
in this thread.
The common theme in all my answers is that I don't use OmniFocus for tracking what I've done. I'm almost entirely future focused. I have no qualms about changing or reorganizing projects and tasks. My goal is to have OF show me truly actionable tasks that move me toward completing projects and achieving goals.