Good q. That scale of complexity sounds to me personally more like project management than a to-do list, and I imagine Taskwarrior or another purpose-built tool

Good q. That scale of complexity sounds to me personally more like project management than a to-do list, and I imagine Taskwarrior or another purpose-built tool would be a better fit for it. As tedmiston points out, if your needs are much more elaborate than "buy_eggs" or "send_report--DUE-MAY17" you'd end up with scripts and aliases and pretty soon you'd have reimplemented a custom Taskwarrior. I don't think I ever find myself worrying about dependencies and prereq's (which is why I use a pen), so the extreme simplicity of it appeals to me.