cdrecord was forked in 2006 to cdrkit and ties with Schilling were cut then. This issue is either a legacy bug in K3b, which shouldn't even care about cdrecord, or a bug in packaging which should install those packages with ownership which makes it possible to run them as normal user.I just wanted to burn a data CD full of mp3 files which will play in my 10 year old car.
I get the impression you are right that nobody cares about CD and DVD recording. If it's as simple as changing group ownership of the installed programs it's hard to imagine why the maintainers/packagers wouldn't have done that long ago.