Add start and finish dates

i think you're talking about start/end dates for issues, not projects, right?
take a look at http://groups.drupal.org/node/1079 for some of my early thoughts on this.

however, i believe (but haven't played with it yet), that the CCK for 5.x can now attach new fields to any node types on your system, not just CCK-created nodes. so, in theory, all you need to do is enable CCK, and define 1 additional date field (the end) for project_issue nodes, and poof, you're (mostly) done. of course, it'd be slick to have the end date automatically set when the issue is marked to fixed/closed/duplicate/won't fix/etc...

of course, the start date you have right now: the creation time of the issue. that's easy.

I just marked #678534: Native due date duplicate.

I'm not sure what I think about this. Seems to go against the direction of #85049: convert project* to CCK and the 7.x-2.* branch where we're planning to be porting this to D7 core field API. Seems like if the cck/comment_cck approach is "clunky", we should figure out how to make it less clunky. ;) E.g. if comment_cck isn't displaying the change as an issue metadata change, we should fix that. There's already a hook in project_issue for other modules to inject stuff into those diffs that are displayed... Perhaps we need a feature request against comment_cck to use this hook...

+1 for this request. Would love to see at least a native "Due date" field rather than retro-fitting a CCK field that doesn't really play well with the rest of the issue metadata.

Also, trying to get around it with comment_driven doesn't currently work, since it conflicts with comment_upload which is a requirement of project_issue.