I'd like to hear from others about practical implementations of Course as the general abstract entity, while Course-Sections are the instances of course offering. see http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=24440&parent=144742
Many posts here are related to this issue, eg, the need to duplicate a course, referencing a course for descriptive purposes, etc.
We have noticed the same issue, and found that the way Moodle handles groups and sections in incompatible with our business model. To handle this issue, we first develop the course on a separate development server in a different instance of Moodle. When the course is developed, we perform a backup of the course, and do a restore on the main server. For each section, we restore to a new course with a different name reflecting the current section: e.g., "Communication for IT Professionals (052)", where 052 is our project code for the Fall quarter.
Of course, the downside is that once the course is live, we cannot restore the course the same way without deleting all student data, so further changes to content and so on have to be done on our production server.
Of course, the downside is that once the course is live, we cannot restore the course the same way without deleting all student data, so further changes to content and so on have to be done on our production server.
As you point out, this solution requires maintaining two servers, which is quite impractical. Also, the reference to duplicate "Courses" which are actually only sections of the same course is confusing to students who may attempt to register to a wrong section.