That's a bad default actually. People coming from other softwares might even think this is a glitch at first, lol. But that's up to you guys.

I agree with changing the default.

Think this is a great step.

If I can chip in I would also like to see Clamp Overlap turned off by default (often people wonder why nothing happens and sometimes there's no going around it) and most importantly Width be set to 1cm instead of 10cm - which is also very rarely used value. Actually Solidify's Thickness is 1cm by default which in contrary could've easily been 10cm and that would make more sense compared to Bevel at 1cm - my students often don't notice that the solidify modifier did something because it's too thin.

What I would also like is if Harden Normals was used by default, it doesn't really do anything until you turn Auto Smooth on anyway but I can see how that might confuse people. It's just a bit of a pain to always enable it.

@Nelson (NAS) Why do you think it's a bad default? To be honest like 95% of all bevel modifiers ever added should've been or are set to Angle. If I could have a counter I bet it would be close to that. Sometimes you might want to bevel all edges but not often.

For context, here are the reasons that Clamp Overlap is on by default:

1. Backward compatibility - When modern bevel (the one I did) was first implemented in BMesh, there was no clamp overlap, and there was a backlash from users with old models that "went crazy" because the previous bevel clamped and they had developed models that depended on that.
2. A feeling that if you take bevel far enough to cause overlap, the model is going to look bad with most shadings at the overlap, so people really should usually not being taking the bevel far enough to cause overlap. And adding to this, on a large model, it is often not obvious immediately that overlap is happening.

Now (1) is a bit of a non-issue. There is a versioning system that can use the old defaults for old models and new defaults for new ones. I may not have been aware of that solution when I first thought (1) was a reason.

At any rate, my dream is that my next big project -- making good and proper geometry when the bevel would start to overlap -- will eliminate the need for that option all together.

Agh, thanks Ankit, I forgot that the modifier test doesn't specify the limit method. I'll fix that right now.