Hi french,
partly I agree on your mail, but in fact I would prefer it, if iJoomla focusses on main-parts, to make them perfect, instead of doing "everything a bit".
For your request there is a very easy solution: By setting all courses "free" and adding a component like "payplans" to your site, you will have exactly what you want.
That´s also what I will do. I feel like the options in payment are not really enough for me (most germans don´t like paypal), and I would prefer Virtuemart as a payment-option, but in fact, there are other things that I think are much more important in an LMS.
Please keep in mind:
If Guru would have includet all of your and my (and the others) requests, the price would be about ten times higher then it is now.
Guru/iJoomla has the potential to get that done. But for the focus, heading straight for one topic after the other is certainly more usefull then working "a little bit on everything". This is why I did choose to ignore the complete payment-structure, I built up the courses on "gradual release of lessons" and have a monthly payment done with Payplans. This solves lots of issues for me.
All the best, Julian!