Being serious and independent is essential when you spend all your time on trading as every action of the day leads to weekly and monthly profits but I bet very few people consider this a major job, we are just part-time members for this job, sometimes we only have a few hours to look at this market and I don't know how serious and successful you can be. Stop asking higher when you don't have much time, observing the signals is enough for you, the biggest benefit here is that it's reference and it's free, payments can have bigger benefits but I do not recommend
I think deciding on your own trades and being in a group doesn't really have to be two separate things. I believe you can be in many many different groups, try to find what people are saying about which coins and then use that to fuel your own trading strategies and research. Do not do what others tell you to do, it is really not something that makes sense, but I do think that investing into something that would be huge gain for you only comes from personal research, but there is no harm in checking out what others would be thinking about.
Long story short I believe you could make your own decisions, you could trade however you want, and you will be definitely profiting from that as well, but that doesn't change the fact that you could also get a decent amount of help from groups, specially signal groups, do not do what they say, but you can research what they say.