(might arrive twice... excuse me if it does)

I was looking through Drupal.org to find if there is work towards granulating the permissions table a bit more, by adding a way to limit administer/access to nodes by type.
The idea (which has certainly been raised before) is to add, next to:

"create TYPE content", - adding new nodes of that content type
"edit own TYPE content", - editing the contents of own nodes of that content type
"edit TYPE content", - editing the contents of all nodes of that content type (whether or not the user has right to create nodes)

two more possibilities:

"view TYPE content" - roles that are allowed to view the content type's nodes
"administer TYPE content" - roles that are allowed to modify the publishing options on all nodes of that content type

I encounter more and more situations where I want to delegate the publishing options permission to a specific role, but only to one content type, otherwise I have to give the person control over the whole site's content.

Such a change should be done through core, so actually my questions are:
Is there any work on this direction / open issue?
Are there already any conclusions?
Should I start writing a patch :-) ?

Cheers,
Zohar