I gotta chime in on this one ... agreeing wholeheartedly.   Always look for the simplest available solution that leverages existing facilities.   If cron can reasonably do the job, without you creating something that will be impossible to understand three months from now, then that is probably the way that you want to do it.

Another notion would be that you could use cron simply to execute some script at the smallest possible interval ... then maintain a list or database (SQLite?) of “what needs to be done” and “the last time it was done.”   The script simply executes each command that has come due, then exits until next time.   But, I am very reluctant to build complicated solutions to what ought to be simple, routine problems.