Will Nautilus ever be able to set recursive file permissions?

Folks,

I'm on Mint12 and have confirmed that Nautilus is still broken.  In
order to switch ownership or other permissions of, for example, an
entire USB drive recursively (all directories top to bottom) I still
have to drop to a terminal and run chown or chmod.

The "Apply Permissions To Enclosed Files" button is still as
non-functional as it was in 2006 when I started with Ubuntu Dapper
6.06.

Is there any effort underway to fix this, or is there another GUI file
manager that isn't broken?

Thanks,

Jim March