How to make SmartThings do what I need it to? Is it even possible?

I’m pretty sure you can do the above. I don’t have any experience with CORE, but it’s a very powerful program created within the community. If you would like to post to a thread for help developing CORE pistons I’ll bet someone there can tell you just how to accomplish this. There is another IOS program, free to create one rule, called SmartRules that could handle this task as well.