OK i see what I was doing wrong. The display in the serverlist was confusing, where it now makes it easy to have the groupname be blank without intending it to be. Under the new design, these 2 entries appear identical in the alt+E serverlist:
description: Random Server Group:foobar
description: foobar Group:$null
It would probably avoid confusion if, since there's no longer a separate line for the group, that each entry should display as group:description instead of group $iif(description == random server,$null,$v1)
And maybe instead of having the 'group' field be optional, have it be something like 'defaultgroup' rather than letting it be blank
And for the $server($server).property issue, when that was added, I was under the impression that it was being added in response to people wanting to know which item in the serverlist was used to connect to the active $network, and I see that it's not.