This would reduce the amount of manual permissions work massively, as I feel I am battling the hierarchical system all of the time to allow things to be enabled properly.

An example of this is when I'm trying to give access to just one branch.

At the moment, giving the repository read / view access (which is required for setting up the repository) then enables that read / view permission for every branch. I then need to manually go through each branch, disable the read and view access and repeat.

This persists down to the folders also, where we need to limit some members of the team to certain submission folders.

A whole lot of manual permissions work could be avoided by separating repository read / view permissions.