Some days ago I needed a node access module for a 5.x site. I didn't want to misuse taxonomy for controlling node access, so I looked out for alternatives. Nothing was really satisfying me, so in the end I wrote a new one...
Content Access
So this module allows you to manage permissions for content types by role and author. It allows you to specify custom view, edit and delete permissions for each content type. Optionally you can also enable per node access settings, so you can customize the access for each node. In particular- it comes with sensible defaults, so you need not configure anything and everything stays working
- it is as flexible as you want. It can work with per content type settings, per node settings as well as with flexible Access Control Lists.
- it trys to reuse existing functionality instead of reimplementing it. So one can install the ACL module and set per user access control settings per node.
- it optimizes the written node grants, so that only really necessary grants are written.