Interesting, I consider that a great feature. That always bugged me in Vim. When I open a file in a different location, most of the time I want to be in that CWD. I guess it depends on how people work.
Oh, yeah, that drives me crazy too. Usually, I cd to the root of whatever project I'm working on, and I want all paths to be relative to the root of that project (though since I started to use ctrlp[1], it's less relevant).
I was hoping I could get a "minimal" setup to edit Python code, and even that was too much to ask for. "Code folding? What's code folding precious? What's code folding?" --Smeagol
Apparently "minimal" doesn't apply to Emacs. Being complex is in its nature. It wants to become everything.
The worst was how every time you open a different file, your `CWD` always changes to that file's location.