I had this problem for awhile when I was upgrading to Snow Leopard in 2009 (feels like ages ago!), because at the time, I still had some HFS stuff floating around, and I wanted to be able use it. I could read, but not write (SL was the first OS X to drop write support for HFS).
Fortunately, everything since 8.1 supports HFS+, so I've simply used that for everything, and when I want to play with HFS, I either do it in an emulator (such as Mini vMac) or go to an older real Mac that can write to it (such as one of my many PowerBooks).
The way things are going, I figure it won't be long before HFS+ becomes read-only (by then, HFS will probably be dropped altogether). I will be sad when that time comes. 21 years for a filesystem which is compatible with virtually every Mac made from 1991 (68040) to present day (Intel) is quite impressive. At least for Apple, which seems to have a distinct disdain for backwards-compatibility.
c