[SpiralOcean]

If your definition of project is... something that requires more than one action to complete... then yes, a parent is a project in that definition.

However, a project is a combination of parents & children.
Parents and children are always moving a project toward completion.
A project has no parent, other than your life, that is being moved toward completion.

I do not think any of us want an application where a project only consists of a single parent and one level of children.

We may as well go back to using a folder with a flat list of pieces of paper in it of things to do.

Allowing an action to have children that move the parent forward to completion is a tremendously powerful organizing, brainstorming and processing tool.

A waiting for action as a child action falls into this method of thinking.
The parent action cannot be completed, until the waiting for item has been completed.

When the parent item appears in the context view again, it allows a person to think:
is this completed?
if not, what will it take to move toward completion.
and you create more children to move that parent toward completion.

We already think of projects this way.
What actions (children) must I take to move the project forward to completion.

My definition of a project is...
Something you want to happen in your life that requires more than one action.

My definition of a parent action is...
an action that moves a project toward completion that requires more than one action for it's own completion.

My contention with how OmniFocus currently deals with projects and parents is...
OmniFocus is hiding projects and parents from the user.

This can be solved in one of two ways:
1. projects & parents could show up in context views
2. projects & parents with no child actions to move the parent toward completion could be grouped, or filtered so a user can see what is holding up a project or parent.

If you agree, please send a suggestion to Omni.