Allow a role to create users I'm looking for a way in which we can assign a select role, the ability to create, edit, and delete users within another role. While its possible to use the "Administer Users" permission for this, it opens up the parties who will be assigned with this role to do all sorts of bad things. Ideally, we would like to limit to what role of user this faux administrator is able to excise.

We've explored using some of the options here, such as Administer Users By Role with some patches to the core User module (I know, but it was outside of my decision) with no success.
Use the Subuser module. This module allows users to be given the permission to create subusers. The subusers may then be automatically assigned a role or roles. The parent of the subusers then has the ability to manager the users they have created.