This is super frustrating. I was trying to pull a list of un-signed contracts by the date they were made available to the parent, only to find that I could not. I would have to look at each contract and find the date I sent an announcement about the contract or other machinations. I think Publish Date used to be an important date when Publish was a required step, but Publish is no longer required, so this date is not added to the system. The system should automatically add "Generate Date" to all contracts and this field should be a column you can add to a Contract List.