If an app is USED to track ToDo items, then it IS a ToDo app. End of story. An app is whatever people think it is and use if for. If I can’t get reminders then I need to go back to a simple pad and pencil! A pencil and paper is not a ToDo app, but it works for that. It is not word processor, but people write notes and letters with it without thinking twice. Pencil and paper is not a calculator app … yet people use them to calculate. See where I’m going with this. How you “promote” it is simply beside the point of what the users want to use it for.
Taking this a step further, Dynalist has a mind map view, but it is not a mind mapping app. It just has that extra feature that some might like. There are ToDo apps which are not outliners, but when I needed an outliner, I would just play games with tabs, spaces, and numeric prefixes to get what I needed.
I guess if you are dead set against doing reminders based on a date I add to an item, then so be it. But seriously, you have to realize that people leave software that is user hostile. At the moment you have a nice light app that gives me about 80% of what I want. If it dips much below that, I’ll find a better solution.