That's plausible. And in fact, I do see a number of dirs with owner:group set to root:root under /var/spool/postfix.
But, I have no idea what the permissions should be. How did you figure it out?
BTW, I'm running postfix in a chroot, though I'm not sure why that would break it now when it didn't in the past (there are no errors when postfix is started).
ps auxww|grep smtp ls -l /var/spool/postfix ls -l /var/spool/postfix/etc/postfix/sasl_passwd.db (you run chrooted right?)
or grep 'postfix/smtp[' /var/log/maillog and look for messages related to sasl and/or sasl_passwd.db
the smtp daemons will run as postfix user and so sasl_passwd.db has to be readable by postfix user.