What I did was only have a small coordinator set on the workspace (really
just one group called "Intranet Coordinator"), and then only they can create
directories on the top level of the Documents folder.
When I create a new folder, I make that same group Coordinator, then I make
"Intranet Author" the author. Add people to that group instead of the
security attributes. In fact, I have two groups for every functional group
in our org to further limit the doc tree. For example, I have
Int-Author-HR
Int-Author-Legal
Int-Author-Ops
Int-Author-Admin
Int-Coord-HR
Int-Coord-Legal
Int-Coord-Ops
Int-Coord-Admin
etc
One or two people in each group are a coordinator, and the rest are authors.
We make sure the coordinators are subscribed to their doc libs so they know
what's going on.
In this way, we not only avoid the SP1 bug of security attributes not taking
effect until restarts, we also make it so that no specific names are ever
assigned on the security attributes. Turnover isn't high, but our employee
base is not static. You want roles instead of names on these folders.
For your quick links issue, you can probably set permissions on that as
well.