Roles and permissions

I see that there is a new default role "Authenticated users" which is probably to fix the issue that if users were given access to the site level activities then they had access to activities on every course also.

I tried to understand this but it feels that this solution is not enough. I'd like to have the logged-in users to be able to behave like students do on the site level activities. Now I have to manually tweak every capability for the "Authenticated users" to match that of the students. I'm not sure if these capabilities will be inherited to the courses, thus I'm recreating the original problem again?

Also, if I add a module or the activities change, I have to check these again.

I'd like to be able to say that "treat all of the logged-in users as Students on the site-level, but don't automatically assume that this means that everybody is a Student on every course". This is the way it was in 1.6, and it worked nicely! With another default role in the mix, it seems like more to worry about for those that are administering the roles and capabilities...

I seem to remember that in 1.8 the SYSTEM and SITE contexts were separated to allow this? But now it feels that this extra role is the kludge to fix this?