sorry for the delay on getting back to this
the staff discussed this and agree that the benefits are that it seems lots of identifiers would find it useful to make sense of speciose genera
the costs to this are a slightly longer rank dropdown and that it will probably contribute to deeper ancestries for some taxa (which can bog things down)
The main cost that we’re concerned with is that it is making the taxon search a bit confusing when there are different nodes with the same name. The recent addition of rank ‘complex’ is an example. Protocol is to give the complex the name of the first named taxon within it (e.g. complex Hyla versicolor contains species Hyla chrysoscelis and species Hyla versicolor). And now when people search Hyla versicolor both the species and the complex appear which is confusing.
Would the same thing happen with ‘species groups’? e.g. species group Sceloporus angustus which contains species Sceloporus angustus and species Sceloporus grandaevus. If so, that will incur the same cost.
Changes to make the formatting of names different for different ranks, e.g say you wanted it to appear as ‘angustus group’ where the rank displays after the name and the name isn’t capitalized would make this a much much bigger chunk of work and would ideally be avoided.