I do appreciate that you can dismiss/throw out the field research tasks that you know you'll struggle with. Unfortunately, the special tasks don't have that option. In addition to the 20 great throws (I think I'm at 16 at the moment), I need to catch a ditto, which I haven't caught one of in months.

The regular assignments can be dismissed? Great.
I can see the reason the special ones can't be, they're components of a story. The option there would have to be to dismiss the entire arc.

Fuck. I've never even SEEN a Ditto.

Yeah, it's kind of hard to see, but there's a little trashcan icon on the right side of the regular ones.

And you won't actually see a ditto. Not until you catch it. In the wild, they are disguised until caught.
I looked it up earlier and they are disguised as the following pokemon:

Gen 1: Pidgey, Ratatta, Zubat, or Ghastly
Gen 2: Yanma, Hoothoot, or Sentret
Gen 3: Zigzagoon, Taillow, Gulpin, or Whismur

So you basically have to catch a shit-ton of those for months on end until you finally get lucky.

Wow, that's unique and more realistic than encountering a Ditto in its real form. I kinda like it.

It is definitely a unique way to include them, although irritating when you really meed to find one.
XD

I nicknamed my Diglett "Holy Moly".

I can imagine that.

Randomly caught the only pidgey I've seen in a few days and it was a ditto!

I'm never gonna be battle ready. D:

I need to play more LOL

I've reached the third set of special research and it might be the end of the line for me at least for a while as two of the assignments are:
- Battle in 2 gyms
- Battle in 2 raids

As I've said I've got one gym that I can easily access. I've never hung around in any other area that has a gym and I don't get raids near me often.
I've got to get out there more.

EDIT:

Does Ninanic lurk around here?
There was a raid at my local gym today, just 22 minutes after I started walking my dogs.
So I made my usual Pokestop route and gave it a go. On the second attempt, I won! My newly evolved Pigeot (Windy) against the Snorknot raid boss.

Though I didn't have to win or even actually battle, it registered in my research log after I turned in my raid pass.

Unfortunately, a raid doesn't count as battling in a gym as I didn't get credit for that. :P

Finally booted from the gym today. Spent a good bit of time walking around and got two goals towards fancy research, and three towards regular research. I left one on hold to see if I can save them up and accept them over several days.

Now I have an "evolve 20 pokemon" goal which is mildly annoying as I just went on an evo spree a few days ago after putting it off for months. Blah.

Got into a raid though, with another person! Just showed up in the lobby while I was waiting. Got a sableye, and of course I tossed with "win a raid" goal. -.-

Ah man...I didn't finish my catch ghost type 20 ghost type special research before the Gen 1 festival ended and now ghost types are really rare/hard to find again.
XP

Apparently PoGo is not going to load on my phone anymore also. So that's fun. It jusy keeps timing out and saying that it can't retrieve my game data. And yes, I do have the app up to date.

I've had my share of issues opening the app.
I had to quit on my old phone, a Galaxy 4 because after a certain update it crashed during loading every time I opened it. I've got a used 7 Edge now.

I've still had times when it would be unable to process my login information or just freeze with a 'sign out' button popping up during loading.

I also had trouble getting into the raid I participated in yesterday afternoon. It kept freezing and telling me there was a network error but shutting off wifi seemed to solve that problem.

As for ghosts, Gastly has been a relatively common encounter in my area but they're hard as hell to get into a Pokeball so I've sworn them off and intend to just do the buddy system with my Haunter.

Immediately after posting that, it logged me on, no problem.
I pretty much never have my WiFi turned on just because there are almost never any available WiFi connections unless I'm at work.
For raids, mine occasionally is glitchy like that, but it's not very often.

I almost never have wifi turned on either but had to turn it on not long ago to update Chrome.

Yeah, that makes sense. All those darn updates anyway...