Migrating to org-mode - question on lists

[Vladimir Panteleev <thecybershadow@gmail.com>]

Hello!

A lot of thanks to all org-mode developers for their work.

I've started using Emacs and org-mode last year, and have been steadily 
trying to migrate all of my notes from plain text to org-mode.

I have run into some difficulties with porting over my project notes and 
to-do lists. For example, my to-do lists generally look something like this:

- top-level task
   - something I haven't done yet
   + something I've already done
     - a minor improvement that I haven't done yet
   x something I decided isn't worth doing
   ? something that needs further clarification

My software design notes look similar:

- name of the component
   - one idea of how to implement it
   x an idea that turned out impractical/impossible/etc.
     - rationale
   + the idea I went with
     - rationale

Real example (notes for a serialization library): 
https://dump.thecybershadow.net/ec9518b75f1001467972fb7deee058e9/notes.txt

Although this mostly corresponds to using org-mode lists with 
checkboxes, the biggest obstacle I encountered is that there is no 
equivalent for the 'x' bullet. I've tried to simply mark off those items 
as checked checkboxes (and indicate the information some other way), 
however I've invariably found this as a regression in legibility.

So, my questions are:

- I've looked through the documentation (and source code, a bit), and 
though it doesn't seem like it, have I missed some org-mode 
functionality that would help this use case?

- Would it make sense to teach org-mode to recognize another checkbox 
state (e.g. [!])?

- Perhaps it's more practical to instead get org-mode to work with the 
syntax I already use. This would mean:
   1. Being able to customize which characters org-mode considers as 
list bullets
   2. Preserve each list item's individual bullet when reformatting lists
   3. Optionally, allow recognizing certain list bullet characters as 
counting towards statistic cookies (as either completed or not).

- Would the above changes be something I could perform myself with a 
reasonable amount of effort? And, would any of them make sense for 
inclusion into org-mode as additional options? (IMHO, a customizable 
alist for recognized list bullets and their effect or statistic cookies 
would be very nice!)

Thanks for reading this far!

-- 
Best regards,
  Vladimir