This could help us evolve to a new AEiC workflow, where the managing EiC of a paper stays with that paper until publication. Such a change could help us distribute the workload better over time, and prevent burnout weeks for AEiCs.

I feel like the danger here is that it could increase burnout, by making AEiCs continuously responsible for a set of papers, rather than just responsible for starting them and then for those that need action during the week that they are on duty. I'm ok with showing this info, but I don't think it should mean that this AEIC should always be responsible for everything related to that submission

Well, after the pre-review was initiated and a handling editor assigned, the AEiC would come back only at the final stage, when the handling editor has received a recommendation from the reviewers and has completed the final checks. It's not a great load of work for one paper.

As it works now, we sometimes have quiet weeks that are a breeze for the AEiC, and sometimes have weeks that completely slam you from day one. (You and I both had a week like that recently.) And if your week happens to fall when you have travel, or some other irregular event, it can get scary when suddenly you need to read and publish half a dozen papers in one day. Unfortunately, once a handling editor pings EICs for final acceptance, everyone expects us to jump in and complete the publication on the same day. I confess to feeling overwhelmed sometimes on my rotation.

I guess this is a just a preference issue - I would much rather know in advance that I will have a week where I have a number of things to do, and then 4 weeks without AEiC duties, than to have some of them during those other 4 weeks. And in the case of travel, for example, I think we can swap weeks when needed. My busy week at the start of the year wasn't busy because of lots of new things that week, but rather because of things that weren't done during the preceding week, but we worked through it all and were back to on schedule by the end of the week

I agree with you both here - this change has both the potential to allow a different editorial management flow for EiCs but also increase the likelihood of burnout for EiCs if using this feature meant that the EiC who opened the issue was responsible for sticking with the paper through the whole process.

My suggestion is that I modify this pull request for now to simply denote the name of the EiC that opened the issue (rather than @mentioning them and assigning them too). This solves the original request in #527 but doesn't change anything else about our editorial flow. Separately I think we should have a discussion as the EiC about how we might want to evolve our editorial processes.