Comment 1 for bug 591130

The parsing of the tasks is done at the Editor level when you type.

The reason is because you don't want to change the content of a text that it's saved.

I see two possible way :

1) make the gtg_new_task parse the content.

2) give gtg_new_task some option to add subtasks.

I would choose option 2) as we don't know what can be the input. Imagine a script that creates new tasks based on email, it would create subtasks for items in the discussion.