As I understand it, the "need" for seq to run as root is so that it can grab on to the NIC, set it to promiscous mode, and sniff the packets.
If that is the only reason has it ever been considered to split off the newtorking code into a seperate daemon, that would dump to a named pipe or somthing on tha machine, which the client (now running w/ only user perms) could just read off the data stream the the daemon is now spitting out.
If there are more reasons (that don't invlolve the file permissions of the /usr/local/share files) I'd like to know. I'm thinking about working on this in some of my spare time (not that I'm sure it really exists, spare time that is).