control over author categories as default in insta

i’ve got a developer looking over modification of what a ‘level 1’ author sees when he/she logs in and selects a category to place info into..
however, what would be nice is a wordpress core feature that says, to this effect, when you create a category (and possible for any subcategory), you define the permission level required to post to that category – so if youv’e got a typical site with lots of categories along with an ‘about us’ section and so on, authors could login and not be overwhelmed with 20 other options – they’d just see the 3 or 4 that matter to them
or alternatively, a variation on multiple blogs, the author logs in and only sees text entry – all entries are defaulted to that authors name and not any category (the admin would then control the ability to ‘automatically ahve all postings by that author fall into category x,y or z)
needs would depend on the site, of course, just throwing this out there.