We have wholesale and retail customers.

Can we:

1.  Tailor shipping methods to the "audience", as you can do with categories (e.g., only make free shipping available to roles associated with retail price level customers, but not have it available to roles or customes with discounted price levels).

or

2.  Ensure that their default shipping method in their customer record is one of the shipping methods available, even if it is not available to everyone via the "Display in Web Site" checkbox.

Either way, it seems that shipping methods should adopt the same methodology as web store catetories, where you can tailor accessibility to the audience.  As far as I can tell, it doesn't, and this seems an inconsistent methodology that handicaps the web store in a number of ways (i.e., the shipping method problems related to shipping address and different ship to countries could be solved if shipping methods had an audience tab like categories does).