No Problem.
Yes, the actual start date is captured as soon as the first task is marked as In Progress, even if the project isn't "active". To record an active date there needs to be some sort of an action or trigger in Workfront for it to capture the date. My recommendation would be that either a project review task is created and reviewers mark it as in progress when they start their review to update the actualStartDate. Alternatively, create a custom project status (something like "In review"), and then we could capture the date that the project was put into this status using a calculated field.
As for your second question, I'm guessing that you are using a project-type report. You could pull the date of a specific task into a column in this report as long as it has a consistent custom field attached to it. Below is some example code that you could repurpose.
displayname=End Date
listdelimiter=
listmethod=nested(tasks).lists
textmode=true
type=iterate
valueexpression=IF(!ISBLANK({DE:End Date}),{DE:End Date},"")
valueformat=HTML
What this code is effectively doing is iterating through all of the tasks within a project and locating any task that has a "End Date" custom field attached to it that is not blank. If it is not blank, it will return the value captured within the End Date field. If the field is not attached to a task or if it is blank, it wont return any value.
I hope this helps.
Best Regards,
Rich