Welcome to the forum.
There are both good points and deserve separate posts.
For point 1: This is a good suggestion to be able to customise your approval options. There are workflows that say approve or reject, but I see the value in request changes. This is useful for me when I am reviewing documents / reports / presentations for example submitted by my team. Request change means, I made some tracked changes and left comments on the docs that need their attention. In other instance, if a workflow is holiday request, then approve / reject would suffice.
For point 2: Currently you are unable to change the status of a task based on a single subtask. The rule that is available is that if all subtasks are X, then the task is Y.
I do not know how you lay out your project, but few ideas:
- Consider having the approval as a task instead of a subtask. You can create / dependencies and rules to help you progress the other task once approval status changes
- If custom fields are a feature in your project, then consider introducing an approach where by people interact with the project via the custom fields. This way your rules will apply. I know it is not ideal, but maybe it could help a bit.
Here is another thread which you might find some info to help you:
How to use approval subtask to trigger main task changes? - #4 by lpb