Conditional Formatting Referencing Merged Cell Issue

Here is my table:

table1.PNG

It all started where I wanted to basically format each row from E3 onward to be "blank", only if the date associated with each entry is empty. Column S has a formula. So the format applied would make text white, border lines white, and fill would be white.

The info I could find online showed that i can do this but I ran into problems when the reference I was using was from a merged cell, since the date was being put into a merged cell. The formula I was using would only affect the first row of each entry, leading me to learn that a merged cell is really more of a superficial display of the info, formulas still reference a cell even if it is part of a merge. I tried to go around this by making a formula to copy the date into individual cells in each row per entry. As you can see from the image, the formula I tried to make doesn't work well. I was going to use this column C to aid the CF I wanted to make so I run into a different problem limiting me from finishing what I thought was going to be simple. Any help would be appreciated.

This is what I would like it to look like if it is working correctly:

table2.PNG

Maybe even being able to get rid of column C would be good too.