Sorry about not addressing the other points earlier!
From what I understood from your post, the pain points are mostly:
- The todo lists can be edited and you don’t want that (highlighting the next item is a natural consequence of this);
- There’s no easy way to uncheck all the items in the todo list.
The “uncheck children” shortcut can help with No. 2 but not No. 1.
Unfortunately I think it drifts too much from the current Dynalist to make a list work and look so differently than the other lists.
If this is a strong use case for you, maybe a specialized software can help. Something like ProcessStreet comes to mind. Or if we have a plugin system one day, this can be a plugin but not part of core Dynalist. We have no plans to implement anything like this right now, but if anyone’s interested it in, feel free to like OP’s thread or comment so that we can gather more feedback and re-consider.
I hope that’s understandable!