Hi David,
Thanks for the excellent question.
Jo-Anne Alfafara did a webinar in January showing how to map tasks in a form to a task list in SharePoint:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oQ7QdpYdx8&feature=share&list=PL581899A129522F53
We also did two webinars focusing on dashboards in February and March:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TkcXAbxzBA&feature=share&list=PL581899A129522F53
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fv-J8Qm4UeY&list=PL581899A129522F53
These three webinars (and the accompanying samples) all show how to map your InfoPath form data to a SharePoint list using CAML (out-of-box). qRules will make it slightly easier to map and much easier to maintain the mapping. qRules also supports round-tripping values to lists and mapping to multiple lists.
We're actually planning a Webinar for this summer that will show how to do project management using InfoPath forms and lists - i.e. your specific scenario. I'm guessing this will be in August, so stay tuned. If you get your sample working using qRules and let us showcase it in the webinar, we'd be happy to provide a free qRules dev license for you.
Good luck,