This is a long thread, so I hope I'm not suggesting something that has already been said.

At the moment you can give a user/group admin rights over a module. Forhttp://iamstalker.com I have hacked all modules so people could eg get admin rights over one category in a module, like one news or downloads category. This way I can give people something like a "hosted site". What I would like in Xoops' core is that every object has it's own read and write permissions. Maybe like on a unix system each object would have permissions for a user, a group and the rest of the world.
This would make it a lot easier to limit access to eg certain articles and will make my "hosted sites" easier to implement.
I think this would make the great framework XOOPS offers a lot stronger.