Reducing clicks for entity creation is our dire need too. This is not only about task-entities, but any entity in any place. But let’s brainstorm a bit about the inline task creation.:
Using scripts to change rich text
I thought about creating a script that checks a rich text field for a higlight of a particular color, fetch the highlighted text, uses that as the title of a task is creates, and inserts HTML that corresponds with an inline entity reference to that entity. In that case, only choosing a particular color highlight will trigger that script to create a task out of it, saving many clicks.
Another way to approach this is to create some ‘tokens’ which triggers a script to coverts the whole sentence into an entity reference, such as ‘$T’
On the other hand, there is currently development going on around references 2.0 which may improve things, and its probably a good idea to post the request for a ‘single click entity create’ sub-feature in that feature topic: