Workflow + subscriptions - trigger by action rather than "published"

Please comment on how you are invoking email notifications, in general and for taxonomy subscriptions. Does anyone see a problem with workflow and drupal access model and/or 3rd party modules that supply that type of functionality?

With workflow, the natural point at which an announcement notification message should be sent is when the content changes to a certain workflow state -- e.g. "Posted". And the tools I see available for this task range from "send a tokenized email to a role" via the Token module (token_action.module) to the Subscriptions module.

I'd like to allow a full subscription suite, since blanket notifications by token_action will eventually spark subscribers to ask for a means to opt out, and since subscription to taxonomy terms is crucial. So it seems the best way is to adapt some sort of subscription module that's geared toward taxonomy and content types.

But it seems that workflow doesn't quite mesh with subscription and/or notifications modules. Workflow observes the drupal access model, and the eventual result after hooks and filters is a list of nodes the viewer is allow to see. In contrast, subscriptions triggers the notification based on the drupal core "Published" flag. BUT since workflow requires all nodes to be published in order to impose its access rules, the result is that subscriptions sends it's notifications immediately upon node creation, NOT at the point that a node is Viewable.

I'm very committed to Workflow for an application that allows users (it's a private site, so I refer to them as "subscribers") to create projects and upload files. Mine is setup like any app of this sort -- subscribers login, create new content, submit for approval (several approval levels, each by separate roles), and eventually the content is made visible to other subscribers. Finally, if a node is taken offline for some time then I wouldn't want it to be announced again on subsequent reposts.

It would be nice if Workflow could impose it's access rules without the published flag (is that drupal's key to imposing access hooks?), and have an action to change the published flag. (Would also be nice if could define an action to/from a single state rather than have to specify two distinct from/to states, but that's another conversation.) Alternately it would also be nice if subscriptions could be invoked by an action rather than only by the published flag.

(I'm sure there are lots of reason why/how, I'm just not yet very familiar with subscriptions and notifications.)

• Has this issue come up with anyone else, and how did you attack the problem?
• Is there another module that works well with workflow?
• Any consensus or opinions on a best approach?