Reusable consumer across consumer groups

Hello Apache Kafka community,

Current (Kafka 0.8.1.1) high-level API's KafkaConsumer is not lightweight
object, it's creation takes some time and resources, and it does not seem
to be thread-safe. It's API also does not support reuse, for consuming
messages from different consumer groups.

I see even in the coming (0.8.2) redesigned API it will not be possible to
reuse consumer instance to poll messages from different consumer groups.

Can something be done to support this?

Would it help if there was consumer group as a separate entity from
consumer, for all the subscription management tasks?

Kind regards,
Stevo Slavic