“Should we just make it a setting?”
Like everything else in the universe, software products are subject to entropy. The default state, if left unchecked, is more: more features, more cruft, and more settings.
But the job of every product person who wants to build truly great software is to fight against this entropy—to simplify, to reduce complexity, to reduce the cognitive load for users.
Yes, your job is to decide what the default behavior should be for a feature or workflow. That’s the hallmark of great software: it just works. It does the thing without requiring endless configuration or mental gymnastics.
So should we just make it a setting? No. That’s the lazy way out. Have an opinion. Choose a sane default. Do the hard work of thinking through the mess that is your software on behalf of your users that just want to get stuff done.
And don’t forget—removing a setting is ten times harder than adding one. Not just because you’ll need to migrate user preferences back into defaults or write more code, but because no one wants to revisit an old decision when there are a million other things to do.
So have an opinion and ship a solid default. That’s the job.