Thanks sashko! Of course, better is always subjective and I’ve yet to feel fully confident about this one. After reading what I’ve written below, do you see any downsides to this approach or ways to make it simpler?
Your response prompted me back to one more look and … I think I’m guilty of coding while tired 
The SimpleSchema documentation clearly pointed the way in stating “If you want to change any of the default cleaning options, you can pass in those, too.” The “filter” option is the first of the cleaning options and is the key to the problem.
Setting validate to:
validate: Groups.schema.pick([
'name',
'description',
'visibility']).validator({ clean: true, filter: false }),
behaves as hoped.
So, I think the key to this approach is to always run validator with { clean: true, filter: false } in this context.
In looking at the clean options, I also noted “extendAutoValueContext”, I wish I had seen that a few days ago as it may lead to a solution to another problem I had in server-side testing of a ValidatedMethod in the context of a with Mocha. The _execute put the userId I had defined in my execution context into the Method, but that didn’t make it into the SimpleSchema validation attached to my collection. I was referencing userId in a defaultValue setting in there and it was coming up undefined. Perhaps I should have forwarded this.userId into SimpleSchema using “extendAutoValueContext” as an option on the insert. If so, should this also be illustrated somewhere in the guide? It’s probably not unusual for defaultValue and autoValue functions in SimpleSchema definitions to reference userId.
I probably should be writing a wrapper of some type that takes a SimpleSchema and calls validator with the proper settings for clean, filter, and extendAutoValueContext and returns a function… hmmm.
I’ve thrown some excerpts from my code that should pretty well reveal the pattern I’m now using below.
const GROUP_ID_ONLY = new SimpleSchema({
groupId: {
type: String,
regEx: SimpleSchema.RegEx.Id,
},
});
export const insert = new ValidatedMethod({
name: 'groups.insert',
validate: Groups.schema.pick([
'name',
'description',
'visibility']).validator({ clean: true, filter: false }),
run({ name, description, visibility }) {
//...
},
});
export const archive = new ValidatedMethod({
name: 'groups.archive',
validate: GROUP_ID_ONLY.validator({ clean: true, filter: false }),
run({ groupId }) {
//...
},
});
export const rename = new ValidatedMethod({
name: 'groups.rename',
validate: new SimpleSchema([
GROUP_ID_ONLY,
Groups.schema.pick(['name']),
]).validator({ clean: true, filter: false }),
run({ groupId, name }) {
//...
},
});
