[alexpopescu]

How about "they should be an invitation to learn more about the system" :D? As far as I can tell, in many cases these defaults have almost never been reviewed by devs because most of the early users already knew what tweaks they needed.

[jamesaguilar]

I dunno. Personally I'm a big fan of the "sane default or no default" approach. I think that mongo's former approach is irresponsible engineering (I understand they have fixed it recently).