The dev's don't care about giving more power to server owners to allow server-side characters, and anti-griefing measures (because yes, it can be done easily), but if they did this game would be insanely better on every level.

It would be the single most important update the dev's ever made. Unfortunately there are mods to support this. I have tried it, but it's not as easy as just slapping on the mod, you have to do a bunch of weird stuff to your network and install other things that could be easily outdated.