The woes of creating an event-enabled lecture/seminar content type

My initial requirement was to create the new node types “lecture“ and “seminar”, which I did with CCK, adding fields for lecturer, semester, time/place etc. Per se the job was done here.

Then the idea arose to be able to add a protocol/minutes to each appointment, which would be accessible via event-enabling each lecure. The added benefit would be that changed coordinates of the lectures and new uploaded materials for each week could be added to single appointments.

This seems unfeasible largely because in an event series each appointment is not really just a token of the lecture type but by creating a series the specified number of events is spawned and each is created equal.

This exposed several problems:

-The search results are cluttered by each instance.
-The machine-readable content type is displayed (because CCK was used; discussed elswhere)
-The start and end times in the drop-down lists are reset to 00:00 every time the node is edited.
-It’s unclear when an event instance was dissociated from the series.
-Most noteworthily is it hard to list lectures now that they are events, all instances of the series would be listed, instead of just the type or the first instance.

To overcome the last issue it was attempted to use the views module to filter out any lecture instances not starting in the current week. There’s an error when using views with the filter "Event: Start date" with "less than or equal=now+604800" and "greater=now", which reads

user warning: Unknown column 'event.event_start' in 'where clause' query: SELECT node.nid FROM node node LEFT JOIN node_data_field_semester node_data_field_semester ON node.vid = node_data_field_semester.vid WHERE (node.type IN ('content-seminar','content-vorlesung')) AND (event.event_start < 1149945407 + 0) ORDER BY node_data_field_semester.field_semester_value ASC LIMIT 0, 99 in /usr/share/drupal/includes/database.mysql.inc on line 120.

Filtering for "Event: Start Month", as well as Day and Year works however, which is the main reason why this ticket was filed.

The collateral question is whether we should refrain from combining a lecture node with the event calendar, because of the token vs. type issue in an event series.