[Edit: Issues, Bugs, and Requested Features should be tracked at Google Code, not here -- matt, 2010-04-23]
Less Wrong is still under construction. Please post any bugs or issues with Less Wrong to this thread. Try to keep each comment thread a clean discussion of each bug or issue.
Requested features... sure, go ahead, but bear in mind we may not be able to implement for a while.
I would not say that it is a priori a bad thing to complicate a user interface in order to guide users to a particular sort of behavior. Note the effects of defaults and compare Cass Sunstein's 'Nudge'.
Nonetheless, I completely agree with you that this is a bad design decision.
This only applies to the optional features, where you need to discourage the users from doing something usually bad, so that they'll only resort to that if they know that they do need to use the dangerous feature. In our case, the discussed feature wasn't optional.