Man I forgot about that other thread. But as I see I said in that one, it's an obvious application of Mongoose' long-standing Task Chain rule. Which, I gather from other threads, not every group uses as much as I got used to doing in 1e. So I may be in a minority in going that direction, but it's well founded.
It doesn't really. The question becomes, do you take the Task Chain rule at it's plain English meaning,
OR do you require that every possible application of Task Chains be spelled out for you? Both are coherent positions, but paradoxically you can't do both. In MongTrav, running strictly by the book (which includes task chains), and only using options that are explicitly spelled out, are mutually contradictory positions.
And if this is true, does it count as the captain's action instead of being able to take the action that grants the initiative bonus?
Well it's an action anyway, so it runs up against the general rule of -2 for doing two things at once. And you want to be careful about stacking minuses onto task chain attempts, as well as onto your initiative.