Even if everyone in your group is trying to put the effort in and not a flake, arranging meetings in our modern world is a pain in the fucking ass, especially if you all have day jobs.
But if on top of that you do have one or several people in the group who are flaky, or lazy, or just suck at doing research you're put in this shitty situation where you either have to nag their ass to work, or just do their work for them. Which then leads to you being tempted to act like a cop and NARC on them to the prof in order to protect your own grade.
The only time I've enjoyed group projects is when the prof set aside in class time to work on it, otherwise it's a shit show, I'll take writing a paper myself over this shit any day.
100% agree. The rationalization for school group projects is always "well you'll have to work together in the workplace" except group projects are not at all the same. In a workplace you are all in the same place at the same time and it's time dedicated for you all to work on it. Very rarely in a workplace are you required to coordinate all your different coworker's free time to work on a project together outside work. Group projects are good when you get class time to work on it, like you said. But unfortunately that's pretty much never because of how condensed academic schedules are.