Hello sullied,

There is a work around.
For openers, you certainly can schedule to the hour or minute in Project. The more detail, the more time needed to set up and manage the project, but it certainly is do-able.
To your other question -- you need certain tasks to begin at the start of the work day. Create a one minute predecessor task linked Finish to Start with the task. Then create calendar which only allows 1 minute of working time per day at 7:59 am. Assign the 1 minute calendar to the one minute predecessor task. This will force the successor task to start at 08:00.

I hope this helps.

Julie