I read Tiger's post with interest and, I must say, pretty much total agreement. If they'll rejig the system this way, great!
But groups are broken now, and although I'd like to see this big set of changes made there are things I'd like to see on a patch basis too.
1) Please raise the limit on groups. 100 might be acceptable, unlimited would be nicer! With a few work groups, a landownership group, a group for my partner's landownership system etc. etc. I've basically got about 1 group that's for socialising. If I went back into mentoring, greeting etc. that's 3 or 4 more groups that I just don't have space for (I don't have time for either but choosing to help is proving to penalise the people you have helping you!). I have a waiting list of groups that I want to join and whenever I get one I need to join I have a really hard set of choices to make.
2) A variety of 'constituional forms' - a land management group for example can be totally frozen by taking votes on removing the (potentially sole) officer so it can't buy and sell land. Since we call them land barons, accord them baronial rights to not be removed. We might also want to extend this to cover multi-tier groups or other micro-perms choices. The founder can't be removed, but can appoint 'officers' who can buy (but not sell) land say... A group such as the NA groups would have an entirely different constitution right for their needs.
3) Better communications:
3a) offline messaging for example without using the vote tool. Micro-perms again! Some groups might want, or need, to limit this to the founder and/or officers, some might want everyone able to do it.
3b) IM filtering - block IMs without being away/busy that reset on logging to being open. If we have unlimited groups then the need for sending to filtered sets goes - we can have an "officers of..." group easily enough, if not then sending to only officers would be nice, both so that we can cry for help if it's that sort of a group without spamming everyone, and so that the officers can chat to each other about business meetings etc. without spamming everyone.
I agree with a lot of what's been said about permissions too and allowing group permissions so I won't reiterate that - I'd be inclined to patch that into the constitution for this patch.
I'm sure this isn't exhaustive, even for me, but even though it might be a fairly big job in some patches, it's about the minimum I can see to make them really useable in a variety of ways again.