Closed Type Families: separate instance groups?

[AntC]

Currently (GHC 7.8.3) the only form for Closed Type Families is:

    type family F a where ...
      -- list your instances here

(This was considered a common use case
 -- for example in HList to put the type-matching instance
 with the non-matching, and that would be total coverage;
 rather than needing a type family decl and an instance decl
 with the instance head same as family.
 That was an optimisation over ...)

Way back the design was more like this:

    type family F a

    type instance F (Foo b c)  where
      F (Foo Int c) = ...
      F (Foo b Char) = ...

    type instance F (Bar e f g) where
      F (Bar Int f g) = ...

The idea was that the separate instance groups must have non-overlapping heads.

This is handy if Foo, Bar, etc are declared in separate places/modules.
You can put the instances with the data decl. 
And quite possibly the family decl is in an imported/library module 
you don't want to touch.

Is this separate instance group idea still a gleam in someone's eye? 
If not, is there some deep theoretical reason against?

AntC