French language Q&A Forum

If a sentence is initiated by a fixed duration, is it always necessary to use passé composé?

For example, if I want to say….

During the six days of the trial, the judge was sitting at the front of the room, the lights were low, and the courtroom was full.

I have a fixed duration…. which aligns with the use of passé composé.  But I am giving a description of the situation, with all things occurring simultaneously, and the information does not progress the story…. which aligns with the use of imparfait.

For me, it makes more sense to use imparfait, but I have been told that the presence of the fixed duration at the start of the phrase mandates the use of PC.

The sentence as I would write it is as follows:

Durant les six jours d'audience, le juge était assis à l’avant de la salle, les lumières étaient sombres et la salle de Cour était pleine

I did not understand the differences in how "to take care of" translates into french? 

I recently saw a rule that confuses me regarding qualitative adjectives. It says absolute qualities should not be modified by additional adjectives if they are comparative or superlative.

One example was "delicieux", it is an absolute quality and one should not say "c'est tres delicieux". To me, this makes no sense. If true, many people break the rule. Plus, I don't consider "tres" a comparative or superlative. Some of the other examples given were "éternel, parfait & admirable". I did a lot of searching and can find no other references, but I may be missing a magic keyword. I would ignore it except that the source is usually good and it was in the context of "very common French errors"

The rule does seem to make sense with some adjectives, from an English perspective. One would not say something is "very eternal", it's either eternal or it's not. I don't see delicious the same way.

Am I misunderstanding this? Can someone clarify?