Projects for Users, not Teams

Projects are really useful for group repositories, but using teams to own them is rigid.

I do research and typically a few people, possibly from different institutions, will come together to do a single project together. I could make a team for every research project, then create a project for that project, but this seems like a really silly workflow. I'd like to be able to create a project where I, and anyone else I assign, is the owner, without having to create a team. I could then add users with different roles to the project as needed. This seems much more flexible than the current workflow.

Does this already exist somehow?