Validations and Required Fields for Update/Returned Steps

I would be happy to be completely wrong and/or overlooking something obvious, but I will just leave my problem and explanation below as I understand things. All of our business processes and workflows are custom built.

It seems like a fundamental flaw in Unifier that required fields and custom validations can't be set to be dependent on whether the workflow action takes the process forward, or is being returned to a previous step for clarification/update. Example: a required date field only known after a certain step in a process or a dollar amount validation that is only mandatory on the final step of a workflow (aka sending the record to End) cannot be returned to previous steps without passing the same validation and entering the newly required fields for that step. Telling the user they can