Yeah, totally agree, defaults absolutely matter. And a bunch of the software @jiggawatts claimed handles gamma badly does in fact have reasonable defaults. The hard problem with images is that you need metadata, not just pixel values, and the metadata isn’t guaranteed to be there or to be accurate. It’s getting better quickly, I think, but it’s not Photoshop’s fault if the image doesn’t specify a color space or gamma, and not Photoshop’s fault if someone applies gamma first and then does a blur or paints a mask and then the blending isn’t what they expected.