If the goals are improved reliability, management, fault-tolerance, etc., you'd be better off using mature software that was designed to solve this problem, and already has good community support, like Condor.
It's like wrapper scripts. They work well until they don't: managing the logs, getting efficient execution, understanding what happens when all become quite unwieldy, whereas a Norc-like approach proves more self-documenting and easy to manage.
I believe resource management is limited to overall system load. Batch isn't designed for things like managing available licenses.
I'm not a huge expert at batch, so if I've missed something let me know.
Condor has DAGMan (http://www.cs.wisc.edu/condor/dagman/) for managing DAGs of jobs, and I suspect that it can scale higher than just a handful of tasks.
I believe resource management is limited to overall system load. Batch isn't designed for things like managing available licenses.
Condor acts as match maker for jobs and cluster nodes using "classified advertisements" (http://www.cs.wisc.edu/condor/classad/). Classads allow you to describe the jobs and the cluster nodes, and to express arbitrary requirements and preferences for both. This allows jobs to say "I need a node with X", but it also allows nodes to express requirements (e.g. "I won't any run jobs coming from the psych department"). I don't see why you couldn't use this system for expressing requirements regarding licenses.
However, Condor appears to be very complex. The PDF version of the Condor 7.3 manual has 991 pages in it. OTOH, Red Hat MRG Grid is based on Condor (http://www.redhat.com/mrg/grid/), so commercial support should be available.
People do just that: http://www.cs.wisc.edu/condor/techpaper/licenses.html
I would not say it is "complex" but ultra flexible. You will not have things working in just one day or anything, but I've set it up without a significant hassle. People have had a lot of ongoing success with Condor in large (and very large) computing environments.
Without that, I'd say it would be a slightly masochistic exercise to take a big system like condor and try to make it a cron replacement; while it clearly has that capability, if that's not one of its use cases, it's going to be a real bear to force it into that configuration. I've been a fringe user of condor before, and it can result in some unfriendly "rejected your job for unknown reasons" situations.