> reminds me of a pdf viewer at some point had an option to "respect permission" or something

Oh yeah, I always say "Don't respect" on PDF readers that have that setting. It's a very nice setting.

In regards to "TearFree" not being on by default, I expect that there's a good reason for it... maybe it adds some amount of latency (whether on hardware I don't have, or so little latency that I don't notice it), or maybe it just flat-out doesn't work right on some hardware that I happen to not have.

Regardless, deciding whether or not to set those settings is the job of one's distro.