Channel groups, totally useless in dope/graph editor?

I mean you can’t select ‘in the same group’, can’t filter by group, they don’t show in the hierarchy as a separate entity etc.

In Softimage it was one click on ‘lock’ to have a selection of animation data visible regardless of viewport selection, how is one suppose to do that in Blender? If I turn on show selected I can’t select anything else in the view or outliner without losing the animation channels display. If not all the channels show. Only way I can see is to use regular groups for filtering and thats just silly.

Please enlighten me if I got this all wrong.