which is ironic considering at one time the appeal of LaTeX was "sane defaults". Don't get me wrong. The default choices were really the best choice at some point in the past. They just no longer are.
And latex is one of very few programs where changing defaults would fundamentally undermine its very purpose (being able to recreate documents no matter how old)
This was true maybe 20 years ago, before TeX engines that output directly to PDF were created. Today, the recommended engine is LuaLaTeX, and it defaults to OpenType fonts.
