This has the makings of a long esoteric discussion about why aerial image focusing is so bad for SLR cameras, yet the most expensive enlarger grain focusers use an aerial image.
My take on it is that it is about magnification. When you magnify the ground glass image it becomes too coarse to use and the ground portion is also not a single plane. It is microscopic hills and valleys with ambiguous depth. Aerial image solves those issues, in exchange for a host of other issues.