I might have asked this too soon. The task is being assigned to a team, and an individual apparently can't interact with the form unless they assign it to themselves.

I'm not sure how I'll deal with this. This particular process can be described by "Recall this, or we're going to do stuff with it". Any member of the team should be able to act on it. It works fine from the Direct Approval pane (tangential question: can we rebrand that? Having the words "Direct Approval" and then a button labelled "Recall" is a bit weird) however, if the user happens to click the link and open the full form they now have a two step process. Hmm... this might be a meatspace issue.

This is by design, for tasks assigned to a team, team member need to assign the task to themselves first then to perform action, when task is not assigned to individual person, the action button won't show on the full form. But with direct approval enabled, user can direct approval the task without first assign the task to himself.  We may enhance this by show the direct approval section when open task with full form as well.