I threw up my hands today, said "Screw it, I'm gonna cheat", and write a script that gets kicked off by crontab every 5 minutes to walk the dir tree (there can be many) and chmod / chown as needed.
And then, I said, "Screw it all. This is on the bottom of my priority list, why am I wasting oxygen thinking about it?"
My PFY was giving me odd looks at that point, and I didn't feel like explaining.
So I then buried it.