Quote - My only fear here would be that if something is collapsed, and it stays that way until you uncollapse it, how do you know you won't accidentally miss something?

I'm not sure what you mean...  Miss it when?

I just think it gives too much info by dfault when you load a large scene...  You see every figure, prop, light, center of gravity, IK link, and magnet, plus the ground and universe.

When I load a scene, especially one that is largely "finished" it's either a setting, or it's a setting with figures.  If it's just a setting, I'm probably going to add figures at some point.  If there are figures, I'm probably going to start posing them.  It just makes more sense to me to expand a figure when I begin working on it, rather than have to collapse everything in order to make sense of everything in my scene.  I can only work on one thing at a time.  Have you ever scrolled down the list looking for a figure's hand only to realize you'd scrolled past that figure onto an item of clothing attached to it, or maybe even another figure entirely?  That's because an expanded heirarchy can have several "r_hand"s in it.  If it it were closed by default, then the only "hand"s I'd be seeing would be those of the character whose hierarchy I chose to see.