I agree. I would love to have an "advanced permissions manager" that lets me specify that AccA can write to the /sys devices for the charge controller and AdAway can write to /etc/hosts, but not the reverse.

That doesn't give me any less power than root, but does give those apps less power and limits the potential impact if one gets compromised. I think when most people say the device owner should be able to get root, they mean that the owner, rather than the manufacturer or OS vendor should have the final say in all cases, not that it has to literally work just like root on Unix.