Unity Perforce workflow - is there a better way than manual checkouts?

I've got a Unity project set up in a perforce depot with 3 workspaces on 3 different machines, and am trying to figure out the easiest workflow for my artists etc. Applying all incoming changes before starting work each day and publishing all outgoing changes at the end of the day is simple enough, but we're running into two issues:

1) Unity blocks editing on all files until you hit the Check Out button manually for each asset, which makes working in Unity a pain. I have already set the Allwrite flag on the workspaces and manually switched off the read only flag on all the files, but it doesn't make a difference. Is there a way to make any non-locked asset editable by default in Unity and automatically check out if you change it? I note that sometimes it does automatically check out related files when changing something.

2) We've already adopted a workflow of each person working in different scenes and working on prefabs, so we don't step on each other's toes at all and don't need to merge anything. We have pretty clear division of responsibilities, so I was considering telling everyone to create their own specific folder and put everything they work on into that folder. Then they can lock their whole folder or sub-folders they are working on and be sure nothing can go wrong. Is that a reasonable workflow, or is this overcomplicating it?