Gypse I agree with your sentiments.
I believe that during my trial run of using WA, I avoided using the "Group" registration function because the Group membership sets a common expiry date for membership and imposes the same access for all members of the group (if I understood this correctly during my trial run). I was hoping instead that I would create each member as an individual membership, and then adding them to a Group would be like a secondary membership level (possibly temporary depending on purposes of the Group).
If I'm trying to create temporary access to workshop materials, for example, I am supposing that members would only need this access for the duration of their time in the workshop (or just prior/just following). Then I would uncheck the access at some point to keep the availability of the resources limited. Meanwhile, the members' other access to parts of the site, and their general membership status (i.e. individual renewal date) would be untouched.
I used to administer a conferencing software system called FirstClass in the past for a distance ed organization (this was not a hosted solution however). A member could belong to many "levels" of membership which were somewhat heirarchical in terms of how they permissions were set on nested levels of webpage containers. So you could temporarily make a person a member of a group for a course they were taking, but when they finished the course, you would take them out of the group. Meanwhile, their basic status would not have been changed at all. I would like to achieve something similar on WA (if it is possible or supportable).
I think ideally on our WA site, we will likely have a level of membership that is "free" with no expiry for the purposes of contact database. However, those members would very likely pay to take a workshop with us, along with members who are "paid". If I lump them all together for taking a course, all of their permissions suddenly become the same - either I have to give access to the free members to all my restricted pages, or take away access to my paid members (not acceptable). I don't want to lump people together that way as I think it would be preferable to have ongoing individual membership for our purposes. I don't want their regular membership expiration to change/expire when I add them to a Group, or their access to other restricted pages to change if they have paid for a membership.
Anyway, hope this makes sense.
Either that, or change "Group" registration so that it is not an either/or alternative between individual registration. All memberships should be individual, and then if a person needs to be part of a group, they could be added while still retaining their individual membership status.