Please make it so that you can select a weapon group regardless of it's configured state and have your triggers configured exactly as they are specified in the selected group.

Currently weapon groups don't allow you to select a group with no addons assigned to any trigger. If a group has one or more triggers with no assigned addons, those triggers will remain set as they were on the previous group.

more information about weapon groups

An alternative to completely changing the workings of the Weapon Groups would be to allow a passed parameter to specify whether the current method is used on the switch or whether the weapon groups as exactly configured (even if empty) are used.

why is this so important?

I can understand how having the existing system that prevents selecting empty Weapon Groups would help reduce the number of questions about weapons not working. What it also does is prevent us from intentionally creating and easily selecting weapon groups with empty triggers.

More to the point of why I want to see some change to this effect, it would allow a UI enhancement similar to the picture to more easily be made.

How about you suggest the devs make the change that you are trying to do with the plugin you are making, rather than suggest a change that will only benefit someone who can write plugins?

That's the thing. It wouldn't benefit just someone with a plugin. It would benefit everyone since it would be an extension of the /weapon# commands for switching. Further, unless the /weapon# commands are changed, you can't easily do what I'm requesting even with plugins.

/weapon# -- switch weapon groups using existing methodology.
/weapon# <arbitrary value> -- switch weapon groups regardless of group configuration

I often use an empty weapon group as a safety switch to avoid accidentally firing dangerous weapons in monitored space and NFZs. This is especially important now that you can't make your mines disappear by jumping out or logging off.

"a change that will only benefit someone who can write plugins?"

False. Besides what draugath said, changes that benefit those who can write plugins also benefit those who can install plugins.

Also, think of it this way. If you want the devs to implement some feature, they often need to implement prerequisite features first. If the prerequisite features are significantly simpler than the final one that utilizes them, it makes sense to request the changes incrementally, so that players can produce stopgap solutions (and perhaps come up with unexpected alternate uses for those features) in the meanwhile until the devs have time to implement the more complex features. Everybody wins.

Perhaps a simple implementation that also makes intuitive sense would be the following:

/weapon1 -- switch to weapon group 1 using existing methodology.
/weapon1 2 3 -- set primary trigger to weapon group 1, set secondary trigger to weapon group 2, set tertiary trigger to weapon group 3. And it would switch to a weapon group even if that group is blank (effectively disabling all weapons for that trigger).

So if you wanted change to weapon group 2 using the current method, you'd do "/weapon2" (triggers retain settings if no weapons are assigned for group 2).

If you wanted to absolutely change to weapon group 2, even for triggers that have no weapon assignments (thus disabling the trigger), you'd do "/weapon2 2 2".

Of course, for this implementation it would make sense for the commands that change weapon groups to be renamed to /weapon1 through /weapon6 for weapon groups 1-6, respectively (unlike how currently /Missile1 sets weapon group 3 and /Mine1 sets weapon group 6, etc.).

meridian, /weapon[1-6] already works.

Ah, you are correct. Even better then.