Hi, I totally get your point about wanting the visibility settings to actually do what they promise — that would reduce confusion for sure.
However, I wanted to gently point out something: even if we hide the trust_level_X groups from the group list, the information is still quite exposed through the badge grant history.
For example, anyone can go to /badges, click on “Member” (or “Regular”, “Basic User”, etc.), and see a complete chronological list of everyone who has been granted that trust level badge. It basically functions as a public TL group list already.
So while cleaning up the groups page is nice, the trust level data isn’t really private in practice. Just thought it was worth mentioning.