Hi Mary, et al:
Has this changed at all in the past 4 years, now that we are on Moodle 2.9+? I would like to be able to do a similar thing as described in the original post - have a user that can create users either specific to a given meta-course or to a cohort, but not see all users in the system.
If this is not possible, is there a way to have the user creation process be self-serve, but with the new user selecting a specific group?