If you have a product attribute group linked to a commerce hierarchy category and you add a new attribute to this attribute group and set a default value, then this attribute does not get a default value for the products of that category automatically. Only when the product attribute form gets opened, is the default value being created.

Imagine having an attribute group linked to a category with 1000 products and you want to add a new attribute with a default value. You would think that the logical behavior would be that the default value is created in each product. Unfortunately this is not done. The user has to go into each product and open the product attributes form, in order to have the values created!

This has been reported as an incident, but we were told that this has been investigated before for other incidents and that this behavior is by design and the reason this is done like that, is due to performance issues! We consider this to be unacceptable. You cannot have wrong data, because of performance issues! The user should at least be notified that adding an attribute does not set the default values on the products.

We suggest that this should be fixed and that when an attribute is added on a attribute group, then the default values are created on all the products where this attribute group has been linked to. We could also have a button on the attribute groups, in order to set the default values on products on demand, in case the attributes don't have values on the products already.