Redmine

The way Redmine shows issues in the Gantt and Calendar views is confusing to me, and I'm not sure if it's an issue with Redmine or if I'm just approaching this wrong. For example:

• The length of a task, and thus the scheduling of tasks that "follow" it, seems to be based only on start/due date, not estimated duration. If I create a task with an estimated time of 100 hours but don't set an explicit due date, it shows up as one day in length. Isn't the whole point that I should be able to tell redmine the estimated durations of and relationships between my tasks, and then have it figure out when each task needs to start/end to stick to that schedule?

• Is Redmine supposed to take assignee into account when scheduling tasks? For example, if I have two 6 hour tasks, I would expect them to be treated as do-able in a single day if the tasks have different assignees, but not if they are both assigned to the same person. This could just be more confusion for me stemming from the first issue, though.

So, am I just missing something here? Redmine is looking very close to something that could help me immensely, but I really need to resolve issues like this before I can make use of it, let alone start evangelizing it.

Thanks to anyone who can help!