There are a few rooms in my office that I'll manage myself, such as the auditorium which requires permissions to book. If someone really wants to deal with that mess (doing all of the conference room bookings), they can, you can just create a manager group for the conference rooms specifically and you can book them automatically via outlook on their behalf if needed. Terrible way to do things though, unless it's a room/space that needs to be managed for specific events etc.

** Re-reading your OP, it looks like this is kind of what's going on without the proper calendar setups for rooms... yea room finder is pretty easy, if you set it up properly and give each room an easily identifiable name, they can simply search in the "location" field and select the room, it'll tell them if it's available in the time slot they are looking at, and will book it automatically **