Centralized Defaults

[bh2smith]

Currently we have default configurations being set in many places:

• at parsing time dict.get(value, default)
• on the function parameters def func(x: bool = True)
• dataclass attribute declarations field: type = x

We should decide on a single appropriate place to do this and stick with it.

My thoughts are the defaults to be applied at config parsing time and all the functions, field declarations require them to be set. The downside to this might be having to be very explicit in unit tests.