Filter by Role in Views

Thanks.
Knowing its not there helps me to stop looking.

With regard to a use scenario.
My site is the intranet for a training program.
I'm setting up a group for each course.
Within each course I have students, faculty and course directors.
I'd like to be able to create a block on the course page that lists all of the students or all of the faculty.
Global roles won't work. Sometimes a student in one course is faculty in another and vice versa.

Is there another way to accomplish this?

I don't think so.
Faculty and students are part of the same group -- for argument's sake let's call it the Algebra 101.
Within the Algebra 101 group there are people with different roles - some are faculty, some are students. These roles are only meaningful inside the group (course).
Faculty can edit assignments etc. Students can read assignments and enter comments.

I am unable to create a view that lists just the faculty or just the students.
Am I thinking about this incorrectly.
Is there a better way to set this up?

As another example; it would be useful to be able to send email to all members who are
1) members of a group
2) in a specific role in that group
Views Bulk Operations would do this if we could filter on role within a group.

In the example above, I'd like to be able to send an email out to
1) everyone in the group (already possible)
2) just the faculty
3) just the students

Does anyone know a work around or some other way of setting this up?

Thanks

Okay. It seems that what I want exists in the 1.5 versions.
I chose 4.x because it seemed that that's where the module was headed and the documentation practically promised poor performance from 1.5.
Are there plans to put views fields, filters and argument handlers back to the 4.x version?
Are there plans to implement them as a separate sub-module?
Should I just bite the bullet and uninstall 4.x and install 1.5?