When there is a new fields added to a style file, the XPP automatic style upgrade process will set this field to a value so the system keeps behaving like it did before.

For SDL engineering and some customers this makes sense. As they do not want the system to behave differently when doing an upgrade.
But I would like to decide myself if I want my system to (potentially) behave differently or not.

The way existing specs get upgraded leads to systems still behaving like it was 1983 and new and existing customers not taking advantage of the progress that the software has made.

Fields like 'enable non-spacing marks' and 'enable CSS inline style' are by default set to 'no', while the correct value should be 'yes'
And a field like 'report Composition forward cross reference errors' keeps being set to 'yes', while it makes a lot more sense if you set it to 'no'.

So I would like SDL engineering to provide a mechanism so a customer (system manager) can decide himself what is the default value for each new field that gets added to the system.
Whether this should be done through an additional config file or a configuration utility is something that is best left to SDL engineering to decide.