When an instructor creates a group and adds students to it, it automatically creates a "Group Homepage" that the students can navigate into. In many cases, this is not necessary, because the instructor is using Groups for purely administrative purposes (such as filtering the gradebook or offering differentiated assignments).
When creating the Group Set, there should be settings regarding 1)whether a groups need group homepages or not 2) whether the the group status is actually visible to the students or not: in other words, there should be groupings that are only known to the instructor. None of the current functionality of groups should be removed, group sets should just be customizable for different purposes. Yes, a possible solution is that instructors could use Sections instead of groups, but at my institution, instructors are not allowed to add students to sections, because that would require that "Add Users" (to the course) be enabled.
