Drupal - Node access-control modules for members-only pages

Obviously there are a lot of factors that you should consider before deciding whether a module has a "bright" future or not. A very good blog post that describes all the factors that should be considered can be found here (it's based on the old theme of drupal.org but you can still get the point).

The final decision that you'll take is kind of a "feeling" that you'll get after you 've spent a lot of hours testing modules and banging your head against the wall, only to realize that the module that you picked is not the correct one. However, I will give you the results of a small script that I have and I run in such cases. It gives you the usage count of the modules that you provide as an input, and here they are:

• content_access: 24939 users
• node_access: 1295 users
• simple_access: 1623 users
• node_privacy_byrole: 3399 users
• taxonomy_access: 6037 users
• tac_lite: 3397 users

Note that these results are just information pulled from the drupal.org website and you should not use them to compare the modules. They are just indications that tell you how other users "feel" about those modules that you are examining.

So, to answer your question, I would go for content access module since it supports the per-role access that you mentioned, there are tons of sites that are using it (meaning that it is highly unlikely to be discontinued), its author is someone that has done remarkable work for drupal and the D7 version was updated -relatively- recently.

P.S: if you want the script, lemme know. It's proven very handy in many cases.

You might be interested in the Premium Content module, http://drupal.org/project/premium_content, which works in a way similar to what it seems you are after.