Actually, the owner of a symlink _does_ matter for sticky directories,
which is why you really want to be able to change the owner.
Essentially, if you cannot change the owner of a symlink, you cannot
reliably do a "chown -R" on a directory tree. Imagine being a sysadmin
and moving a person from one uid or group to another..
In short: either you have to have "lchown()" or your "chown()" has to
act on the symlink rather than on the target. Linux takes the second
approach, which is the traditional one.
Linus