Thanks for laying this out clearly. The use case makes sense: the current Edit Associations toggle is binary, and that creates real friction when some associations are tied to sensitive automations you don’t want users touching.
This isn’t something we’re planning to tackle in the near term. The permutation space for object-level association permissions is significant, and we’d want to get the model right before building it.
We’ll keep this thread as a signal as we think about where to take association controls.