no longer snooze times in mavericks calendar?

I think I have this figured out now after several runs through these discussions and other forums, but I want to make sure I'm correct in my understanding... can someone please confirm?

I used to rely heavily on ical alerts for things that didn't have finite deadlines, but rather some thing would extend for days or even weeks beyond their original date. I'm finding now with the new calendar app in mavericks/10.9.x that the snooze option only works for periods of time longer than a few minutes, when and only when, those lengths of time still fit in prior to the actual time of the event. is this the way it works, or just how I'm interpreting it?

I did find the reminders app still has the ability to snooze something for 1-2 hours or days, or even weeks, like ical used to.

do I need to move ALL my recurring events (such as tax payment reminders that come up 15-60 days in advance of when they're actually due) so that I have the ability to delay them for more than a few minutes?

to give you an idea of how I used it... I would set recurring events for quarterly tax payments to come up perhaps 15 days ahead of when I'd expect to prepare them, which might have been 30 days prior to them being due. now, when they come up in calendar app, they only give me the option to snooze them for a few minutes, not 2 hours, or a day, or a week as I used to depending on my work load and/or prep of documentation. beyond this, I also had several things that I reminded myself to do but weren't critical if not performed on or by that date. I used to push things one day at a time for weeks, and sometimes one week at a time for months. it appears that none of this is possible anymore?

am I correct in my understanding that calendar has severely limited its snooze options and reminders, a completely separate app, is the only way to bring some of the functionality back to my mac? I really do not want to move everything that doesn't have a finite due date over to another app. perhaps I'm better off jumping from 10.6 to 10.9 like I did last week. as I'm reading all the notes, it sounds like others had it worse over the previous versions of 10.7 and 10.8. I'm not looking forward to moving to busycal or something similar just because apple foolishly removed functionality that had been fine for years and years. is there any way to customize plist files or anything that would allow me to bring additional snooze options back to the 20+ calendars I have from the past dozen years or so working in osx?