I too suffer from needing a more aggressive "reminder" or calendar-alert solution. I want to mark certain calendar events as needing to actually alert me (e.g. wake me up at 4:30am three tuesdays from now for that important deployment).

Instead I babysit a Clock alert that can only handle "every tuesday".

There's probably some solution here, but I get overwhelmed by the crisis of choice of calendar apps out there and end up not doing anything but complaining. Like right now. ;)