Just posting to chime in with my vote.
I’m with you guys on this one. The default scale tool makes it useless for 90% of the level designers needs when it comes to scaling multiple meshes at once.
I’ve seen a some requests that are asking for this feature, and I think it gets shot down because the requests are getting confused with a request for true worldspace scaling, which can allow for skewing…but that request is NOT the same thing as what you’re looking for, which is just shared-pivot-scaling.
Shared pivot scaling is exactly when grouping does…and is also essentially what the rotate and move tools do. (last selected object acts as the axis for rotating/moving). It’s really bizarre why this behavior isn’t the same for scaling too.