Trouble with Project Management & Smartsheet Restrictions

I am trying to create a Smartsheet to track project completion (Integration) for my company and am running into multiple hurdles with the reporting. I'd love to hear your insight on how to overcome these issues without having to turn off all dependencies. Without dependencies the product doesn't offer much for project management.

When we start a project almost all of the task dates listed are "target" dates, not actual dates. As these tasks are completed we want our teams to update the "target completion date" with the "actual completion date". The "Baselines" function in gantt view tracks the variance of target vs actual. To give a picture of the project story and to show expectations we use dependencies to trigger when each task will move or start the next task and give teams an idea of timeline. Each of our internal departments use reports to filter down their tasks from the master project sheet(s) and this is where we run into issues. For some reason, when you are in a report you cannot alter start dates or end dates when there is a dependency involved. This is not a restriction on the actual sheet itself, just a restriction of the reporting. I've been told that the duration column fixes the issue, but the duration can't adjust the start date of the project and is a very inefficient tool when a task can often take weeks to complete (making the duration difficult to calculate).

Is there a better way I can be formatting my sheets to take full advantage of smartsheets functionality, or am I up a creek without a paddle? I'm almost to the point where I'm willing to write formulas to recreate all of the dependencies without turning them on, but that feels ridiculous.