Yep - I hear ya. The default sections do kind of mess with any personalized method you might want to use.
One thing on your last comment: you may want to check out this video on My Tasks which shows how Asana intends for users to use it. Basically you’re to take every “new” task and move it into 1 or 3 buckets: Today, Upcoming, or Later.
Lastly, my 2-cents on your specific desire to have “In Progress,” “Hold,” etc., is to mess around with Tags for this purpose. I don’t do this universally with every Task, but there are some Projects we have had where we Tag tasks in a way somewhat like you’re saying. Then you can do a Search (and Save the Search) to show you all “Hold” or all “In Progress”, etc. That might be a way to accomplish what you’re trying to, albeit in a different way.