Right to Publish Flag

My company is building a CMS system with Drupal 5.2 and ran into this module. For that project, we need to arrange 3 basic types of users:

administrators
section editors
content editors

For the content aspect, the SE's and CE's are the important ones. Basically, for a given section (grouping of pages), a CE can create and edit but only a section editor can publish. A SE for a given section may not be SE for another section (same for CE's). Administrators just act as SE's with access to all sections.

The sections translate very easily to taxonomy terms for the node type of "Page". This module works very well for restricting who can view, update, delete and create for those given sections based on role. The only problem is breaking up the "publish" privilege. At least in Drupal 5.2, this is a single permission of "administer nodes", which includes several other features as well. This makes it a sweeping permission and we can't cleanly designate it per section (ie. taxonomy term).

If this module had an additional flag, nearly identical to the one that already exists for "Create", we'd likely be in business. We attempted to try to get this module to play with the "workflow" module but the two seem to compete and conflict for permissions, not work together. That's not a knock on this module as it was not intended to do so, just a fact.

So there's my feature request. If we can't find a way to make this work through a combination of modules and/or small custom-built modules, we're debating altering this module as I described. If we were to go down that path, which version is best recommended to work against so we can offer our patches when we are finished: 1.1, 1.x-dev or 2.x-dev?

Thanks