I agree with Tobias. The change ownership feature is great but when the new owner doesn’t really own the topic (as in: won’t be notified about replies or quotes) it is much less powerful than it could be.
I would like to use this for member recruitment: post a topic about a publication a potential member has somewhere else on the web, invite them to join and when they join, give them ownership of “their” topic. Unfortunately, it’s not possible with this bug.
I have no idea how difficult this is to fix technically, but its effects are certainly more than the minor wonkiness of likes discussed when this was first reported back in 2014.