Sorry but this one is not likely to happen, it would require a lot of changes in the security model in all features. The ability to grant edit permission to an individual user was supplemental so that the user could edit a specific content instance without granting him edit permissions on the page and it was relatively easy to implement.
So yes it may be clumsy to use a role per user if you need to do this for lots of individuals but that is something you could currently do to grant an individual view permission. Or you could write a custom feature to meet your specific needs. If "volumes are not sufficient" then using roles seems reasonable.