Forum .LRN Q&A: Response to dotlrn department and subject adminstration and user assignment

This seems odd.  The groups functionality of openacs is fully capable of supporting a delegated admin function for an individual department.  Was it originally felt that department admin rights were not useful, or does it have more todo a limitation imposed by some other design decision?  I recall some previous discussions on using relational segments instead of groups for dotlrn.  Is this causing some kind of problem that prevents the creation of department admins?