I want Note objects to default to left justified rather than centered text. Is there a way to tweak those defaults?

It'd be nice if there were a tab or a context menu in the properties view that would allow tweaking of the defaults on the fly.

Icing on the cake would be if they could be designated as either global or model-wide defaults with the model defaults overriding the globals. I'm thinking something similar to the Java compiler configuration where there is a checkbox "Enable project specific settings"

Dan, there is no way to tweak the defaults for palette entries. What you can do is to create a component using the Note widget and change its properties to suit your needs.

Right now components are always project wide, but I plan to support project references for sharing components across projects. See this thread.

Try components and let me know how they work for you. There is one difference between a normal palette entry and a component. Components are always linked to their source and in order to edit their properties you need to "enter" them first. To overcome this you can detach a component to break the link to its source. I am thinking about adding a possibility to configure components so that they are automatically detached on drop. Let me know what you think about it.