Obviously the defaults are going to be more popular than my non-default preference, and I would even agree that if there was no default, and people were forced to choose, they mostly wouldn't choose what I want.

However, if you can tell me how to get visual studio to do this, then I would be incredibly grateful.

In my opinion mixing spaces and tabs is completely fine because they are for different things. Tabs for indentation, and spaces for alignment.

Why no auto indent? Because the editor doesn't have enough information to do it correctly (e.g. perhaps you are about to paste some code which is already indented as you want it). I am not saying you should have the same preferences as me, but I am pretty happy with this behaviour, and perfectly ok with pressing tab after enter (or even pressing space 4 times - again, this is just my personal preference and I know that there was a time in my life when I would have looked at this with disgust).

So - how do I configure VS to do what I want?