what a great workflow @edward.peters thx for sharing. 
personally, I use obsidian as my research platform both for me and my team.
for a simple task that required states (Open, In Progress, Finish) we usually use Kanban board from the community plugin, and just like what u did we also use dataviews to query those tasks within a note.
but I think if u needed a much more complex setup of your daily notes, maybe you can youtrack from JetBrains, it’s basically a customizable issues tracker with scrum/kanban board that you can modify as you’d like. for instance, if you wanted to set up tasks based on priorities and some additional workflow and fields you can set it up pretty easy in youtrack.