Upon further review, I’ll have to try this out. Using an “Empty” should be similar to using “Groups” in Maya.
It just always seemed very UNintuitive in Blender, hence the confusion and frustration.
Same for their navigation style. W/E/R is industry standard for Translate/Rotate/Scale, but they felt it necessary to deviate and introduce their own convention. Of course, they now allow you to change the key mappings to Industry Standard, but then that breaks OTHER hot keys, that make following previous tutorials rather, ahem, “challenging”. 