Has 'Administer content' permission always been required to expose publishing, authoring etc options?
This is from node_form() in Drupal 7.0:

$form['author'] = array(
  '#type' =&gt; 'fieldset',
  '#access' =&gt; user_access('administer nodes'),
  '#title' =&gt; t('Authoring information'),
  '#collapsible' =&gt; TRUE,
  '#collapsed' =&gt; TRUE,
  '#group' =&gt; 'additional_settings',
  '#attributes' =&gt; array(
    'class' =&gt; array('node-form-author'),
  ),
  '#attached' =&gt; array(
    'js' =&gt; array(
      drupal_get_path('module', 'node') . '/node.js',
      array(
        'type' =&gt; 'setting',
        'data' =&gt; array('anonymous' =&gt; variable_get('anonymous', t('Anonymous'))),
      ),
    ),
  ),
  '#weight' =&gt; 90,
);


Note that #access is set to user_access('administer nodes'). The revision and options fields have the same access set. So yes, it's always been required, at least as of Drupal 7.

You don't necessarily need a 3rd party module, but you'll need at least a custom module to make changes. You can implement hook_form_alter() (or hook_form_FORM_ID_alter()) to change the #access key of the desired elements in a few lines of code.