[jchw]

I believe another approach is to edit the default registry settings in /usr/share/wine/wine.inf so that new prefixes have the desired setting. Of course, then when updating the package it has to be reconciled. But it does have the advantage of being able to allow e.g. the settings that would only produce launcher icons and not file associations. There's another method using environment variables too, though I think that one basically works the same as removing the package entirely and can't be used to customize the behavior.

I kind of agree with you that the defaults are not great, or at least if things haven't changed. We could always see if maybe they'll accept patches to filter out more stuff by default.