David,
Thanks for the ideas. You're correct that really there aren't true dependencies, but they are put there in order to get an estimated end date. In this simplistic example, there is only one resource on this project.
You'd mentioned that you dont see how Workfront can be expected to estimate it. This is how I expected the calculations to work:
To calculate the estimated Due Date of Task 1, take (1-percent complete) * duration and add that time to now, and that's the est. completion date (i.e., dur = 8, pct. cpt = 25; so .75*8=6, so est. cpt date is 6 hours from now. Workfront does this now!
Task 2 does the same thing, but it "starts" from the est. cpt date of task one, so if it's 50% complete, it's est. cpt date would be 6 hours from now (from task 1) PLUS, 50%*8= 4, so it would be 10 hours from now. Etc.
I looked at your idea about grouping the tasks and making all their durations the same as the total duration and not using predecessors, but the issue is that the Est Cpt Date then becomes whatever the longest task is, meaning that the percent complete on all the other tasks have no meaning. meaning that est. cpt date will not be accurate.
I'm going to continue to noodle on this, and hopefully others will too.
Thanks.
Greg