I don't think such a thing exists. Group synergy is the key to min/maxing in tbc raiding. Often times raid leaders deal with situations where they need to optimize around 7, 8, 9 healers of different flavors, 2, 3, 4 tanks, and the myriad of dps synergies. When doing this on the fly i frequently wind up with 4 good groups and one thats kind of like 'every else'.

To make this easier to do during non raiding hours, i would love a browser or even standalone app that would basically let me drag and drop classes in a mockup of blizzards current raid group interface that would spit out a simple report of classes/specs you used. Doing it with pencil and paper is tedious and doing it during a raid with the theorycrafting mindset is slow.

I lack any kind of meaningful ability to create such a thing, but if someone out there in ej land has the ability and time, i'd be happy to throw them a little bit of cash for their trouble. It doesnt seam like a tremendously complicated undertaking, but i could be wrong.

You could, but the desire to hit a nail with a hammer instead of a toolbox is admirable. It probably wouldn't be too terrible to whip together in an interpreted language, or Java as you prefer it.

I don't understand your question. Different encounters may require different group setups. And you often need to adjust groups based on the personals you have available.

And I believe there was already a thread on who groups with who gets you the best result.

I think what the OP is describing is just a mock-up of the in game raid pane. That way he could select his typical composition, or what he expects to bring to a new encounter, and theorycraft optimal group setups beforehand rather than in the 5 minutes while going over the encounter and buffing. It does seem like it would be nice to be able to work on this outside of raids, rather than trying to do it all in your head or on paper.

You do have to optimize for certain bosses, but for 90% of fights, I find myself staring at a group and trynig to see what's the optimum setup for maximizing synergy and DPS.

I end up shafting hunters, warlocks, and paladins regularly, because of my own internal priority system of giving mages/ele shaman the first shadow priest, and healers the second. And then building the melee group around the dps warrior and enh shaman, with the warlock that has the good imp in the tank group etc. Being able to shuffle around possible group setups beforehand and saving multiple templates of "healer marathon/heavy fights", "dps burn fights", "normal balanced fights", etc would be an interesting tool that could be tailored to individual guilds.

Now effort -> reward may be a bit off, because honestly I usually have a decent idea of what I'm looking for going in, but I wouldn't discount it as worthless.

Honestly, I would say this is a similar process as to what 99% of end game raiding officers do. Now, if you really wanted to do theorycrafting, it may be easier to use the OP's suggested tool, while incorporating things like spec / gear (separate spreadsheets) to come up with an end all, be all, this is the BEST group make up / synergy that one could possibly have.

Also as a side note, since this is generally done by the raiding officer, it's usually on napkins, on his (or her) desk, sorta sketched out...let's try this this time, and that this time, and oh by the way, I thought this would work but it really didn't sort of conjecture. By building a tool that does what the OP suggests, it would allow more definite group make ups, with hard numbers that are hard to refute.

This would most definitely be a very neat tool for all of the above mentioned reasons and seems, at least to me, very worthwhile to develop for the less enlightened among us who'd love to see this visually and not just try to make sense of it in our heads.

This would be a useful tool. I put together a general guide on group composition. But in after doing that, I am pretty sure making an automated tool would be quite complicated.

http://flux.io/2008/02/15/grouping-for-the-best/

In my opinion, the biggest difficulty would be how to compare buffs that helped mana or survivability vs buffs that helped pure damage. For example, is the shadow priest a mana battery or a hit point battery or does the warlock help with stamina or attack power, etc. You could probably make one that optimized DPS easy enough. But deciding when you need DPS vs mana vs hit points would be more difficult since it's fight specific.

It probably could be done, and I would be excited to see it.