My Watchlist consists of profiles where I am on the trusted list. I receive notices of activity on those profiles and they get exported in a GEDCOM.
However, I am interested in many other profiles. If I made a public comment, I'd like to know about activity on the profile. The parents of the spouse of a descendant of a forefather I work on should be in the GEDCOM I export. I may be very interested in some public figure, to the point of wishing to know when the biography has been edited, but the profile is protected and the trusted list is deliberately kept small.
None of that involves my needing permission to edit to the profile.
A possible solution would be to have a structure like a Watchlist, consisting simply of a list of profile IDs, but where the user controls which names are on the profile and which not. You'd get notifications of activity, you can make a GEDCOM export of it, but you are not necessarlly on the trusted list.
A possible implementation could be via templates in a free-space profile.