Frontend upload

Hi, I’ve been a long time – happy – user of WPDM (free). However, I want to change to ‘upload-workflow’: at this moment, a small group of users has admin rights, in order to upload files in he backend of the site. Obviously this is a security risk, but it also feels unnecessarily complicated. A solution via the frontend seems to be the way to go. There are two requirements:

• It must be possible to set ‘access control’ to a specific role. Manually or – preferably – automatically.
• Uploads must be published immediatly, so no admin interference/involvement

I have done some research, and I think there are three solutions:

• Dropzone. However, it seems that this plugin is designed to send files to the site admin. Also in the docs I cannot find a way to set access control by the user. Are my observations correct? If so, this is not a useful tool for my use-case.
• REST API. I am not really sure how it works, but I guess the user has to upload a file to the proper folder (I can make that work) and then the REST API ‘connects’ that file to the WPDM database. I have some experience with the WP REST API, so I am confident that I can make this work. However, in the API documentation I can see that you can GET the access control settings, but not how you can POST/PUT these settings. Can you confirm wether it is possible to change the access control settings via de API?
• Frontend uploader. This seems perfect right from the start :-). However, on the demo site, there are fields I don’t need, like company info and princing, but also most of the package settings. Is it possible to ‘trim’ them, without resorting to hiding them via CSS? Also, is it possible to set a default access control level? Finally, is there some kind of ‘WP-hook’ when you upload a file that I can use to execute some additional functions?

Obviously, I understand that I will need to upgrade to pro, and I willing to do so.

Kind regards, Martijn