Thank you for the thoughtful reply. I submitted the feature request.
In the meantime, do you see a way to use groups to accomplish the same thing? Seems overly complex to me, but maybe I’m overthinking it.
For example, three groups could be auto created for each user upon registration, titled Inner Circle, Friend and Acquaintance. And then “friends” could be auto added to one of the groups, by the user/group admin. Unfortunately this sounds like a mess, plus creates new issues for the OTHER users to do the same thing on their side.