> Which means we have to tell the user to chmod 777 uploads

That's actually what I had to do, and `hub` (git extension for GitHub) complains about the world writable dir everytime I use git inside my `jquery-wp-content` folder. An alternative solution would be welcome.

If I remember correctly, the permission change was necessary to deploy sites that included any resources. Deploying posts/pages worked fine without that. Which makes sense, since those aren't uploads.