I'm glad you got something working and thanks for sharing your use case!
We will keep that in mind as we make improvements. One concern I imagine about allowing code to include arbitrary email addresses would be management by an admin (i.e. how would the admin prevent a rogue publisher from sending emails to a whole bunch of places they should not be).
It sounds like it would potentially fit your use case if you could programmatically filter the list that is provided in the Connect interface. I.e. allow the publisher to subset the list of emails provided by Connect. There are a handful of painful problems of mapping users / groups and such that would need to be thought through, though!
The other option would be a way to programmatically determine / manage variants... Hopefully we can get a more elegant solution sorted in the future!