I ended up using 

task_overrides

 for every change, and this way I only need 2 tasks (a base task and a step task, thus I use 

clone_base_task=True

 and it works as expected - yay!)

Very cool!
BTW: you can also provide a function to create the entire Task, see base_task_factory argument in add_step

I think it's still an issue, not critical though, because we have another way to do it and it works

I could not reproduce it, I think the issue was that when you did the "update_task()" you also updated the status?!
Could you verify? (just to clarify, the import_task, will import the "completed status" as well, hence the pipeline will clone it)