Coming from c4d where the “auto smooth” is on by default, I’d vote to have it on by dafault in blender too. The less clicks the better. 
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I suggested this too, but apparently it’s quite a lot slower. A lot of objects don’t need Auto Smooth and would pay a performance penalty because it would be needlessly turned on for all new objects.
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What about the modifiers that use it then?
I think an axis that got locked in scale/rotation/location should be also greyout:
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How about a “preferences” setting under general preferences for Auto Smooth always on?
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When? I can’t really think of any, outside of rather unreasonable cases and I suspect a few of the cases you might reply with could potentially be considered buggy behaviors in need of fixes, perhaps… 
I’m not sure it’s that big of a performance hit but then again there are still some people running blender on late 90’s hardware it would seem. More importantly if auto smooth really is that expensive I suspect it gets polled/reevaluated too often. Shouldn’t it only happen upon a change to the mesh, ideally only upon actions influencing surface normals/shading?
edit: I’ve stated this before and I’ll state it again, the real issue is that we don’t need 2 things to do the same thing, make/shade flat/smooth should be removed. Objects should be smooth by default and if you want edges sharp you can mark them explicitly sharp.
The automatic angle based edge/normal splitting could still remain a separate option however the reason we are all requesting auto-smooth be on by default is that edge split marks/tags only currently take effect with auto-smooth enabled, or the edge split modifier, but honestly that is yet another way of doing the same thing and I’d rather see the modifier removed to make space for more useful modifiers since one of the main reasons that has been given for not adding many new modifiers is that generally speaking the developers don’t want the list to grow too long(I’m sure theres more to it though). So I’d rather see the edge split modifier go if theres already another, potentially better way to handle/do this.
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No because you can still change values from the sidebar despite being locked, just not directly in the 3D view.
While I’m all for cleanup and unification the Edge SPlit modifier has other use cases besides shading control unfortunately, so it could not simply be removed.
Wasn’t aware of the performance issues Auto Smooth could cause, that is an unfortunate set back for having it on by default.
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I’m guessing you mean in cases of procedural modeling using other modifiers? In that case I’d argue similarly how many of them can set creasing they could set edge splits too, or indeed now that we will have proper catmull-clark SDS with OpenSubdiv creasing of 1.0, 1.0 will itself automatically split edges.
Yeah, I reckon it’s up to the angle based edge/normal splitting that is causing a need for constant re-evaluation. That should IMO be separated out of it as I essentially stated above.
Which is a weird behavior if you want to lock something. If I want to change some values I wouldn’t lock it anyway.
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I have created another solution from python without having to compile blender, but each user will have to run the code or activate an addon if it is done in addon format, it would be very easy to adapt it to addon but ideally this included in the official addon blender…
(Edited) Now in Addon version:
https://pastebin.com/p7Pei0z7
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This should be in by default, not as an add-on in my opinion. It is a lot of help when trying to help someone with a problem from their screenshots. I think this has a bigger impact on Blender’s community than it might seem.
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I agree should come by default, hopefully, in fact the first version that I did something similar was modifying blender in c the core, but that’s where the thing stayed.
Ok, someone did not think this through:
In the 3D view, B is box selection and C is circle selection.
In the Outliner, B is box selection (because industry standard shift selection doesn’t work), and if you’re in the “view layers” mode, C is create new collection.
sigh
Even when 2.8 brings new features, the outliner is still the UI from hell. 
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I second that the Outliner UI needs some serious love – especially with better +Shift or +Ctrl selection!
The new “almost layers” system with “collections” is great, but still being unable to use Shift to easily multi-select consecutive items/objects… OMG what a pain. D:
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Not sure if this counts, but I can never remember how to make a circular pattern from the array modifier.
Super illogical UI to me… always need to look up on Youtube, instantly forget after I’m done.
(EDIT: And now that I’ve looked it up, having to switch back and forth between the modifier and the object transform to change number of patterned objects is really a paper cut!)
I really dig this! Would it be possible to do this for the Vert/Edge/Face counts as well? Being in the bottom corner, and very small, makes it super hard to read at times.
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Oh. My. God. Thank you so much! I’ve been wanting this for so long.
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I agree should come by default, hopefully, in fact the first version that I did something similar was modifying blender in c the core, but that’s where the thing stayed.
Why is this not a thing yet in 2.8? This is REALLY helpful!
and also it shouldnt get keyed at all anymore when it’s locked
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