People often want to know the 'default' value of a key.  With schema defaults, translations, vendor overrides, translated vendor overrides and sysadmin lockdown, that word doesn't have a good meaning.

One concrete question that can be asked, however is "what value would this key have after I call g_settings_reset() on it?".

This has given rise to the semi-common pattern:

  s = g_settings_new ();
  g_settings_delay (s);
  g_settings_reset (s, "key");
  g_settings_get_string (s, "key");

which works rather well.

We could add a g_settings_get_reset_value() to prevent this song and dance.  The main problem there is that g_settings_get() has quite a lot of variations and we'd probably not want to have:

 g_settings_get_reset()
 g_settings_get_reset_value()
 g_settings_get_reset_string()
 ...

So maybe it's not worth it at all.  If we only add one or two of those calls (maybe the GVariant* and the varargs version) then most people (particularly from bindings) may actually find it *easier* to just do the 'delay' trick above...