Lock down Comments in Templates [a "Can View" permission mode?]

We use a few pretty complicated Templates that get tweaked every so often. When a new project gets made from a template, the comments posted to that template (usually feedback, suggested changes, etc.) get copied to the new project. This is a bit of clutter/distraction. We’d like to either be able to configure a template so that it’s comments don’t propagate to projects or give people view-only rights to templates so they can see the template (and make projects from it) but not mess it up :-). My kneejerk inclination would be toward the latter. Conversations threads could serve the roll of a forum to provide feedback/requests to adjust an underlying template.