I’d need quite a bit of convincing on that. I feel this super weird permissions convention was something that vBulletin accidentally foisted on the world, and now we all suffer as a result. Basically it was “oh, here’s One Weird Trick™ to pretend our forum is a ticketing help desk solution, tell the sales team they can start selling it that way!”
(if you need a ticketing help desk system, use one! and that’s on top of the whole “hey what if permissions were per-topic” which is .. a massive and unnecessary undertaking)
We have rudimentary forms of this already, for example the topic owner can reply an unlimited number of times to their own topic.