I'm repeatedly tempted to make "approved" and/or "front-paged" the default state that can be taken away (because it should be the exception that doesn't get approved/FPed so it would save effort, for example).

But many nodes (way too many) start out being inappropriate for their section (because they are so badly formatted) and even more start out inappropriate for the front page because they don't have a READMORE -- fairly long nodes aren't much of a problem being approved into a section but are more of a problem on the front page (but this is just a matter of degrees).