This has just come up today, when I was creating several lists for an outreach effort and had to remove certain extraneous columns and add others on every single one. 9 times out of 10, we're not as concerned with Last Action as we are with Solicit Code, since the vast majority of our constituents are alumni who have had contact from a gifts officer, but they may have ask the alumni engagement team not to send emails. We have a ton of attributes, so scrolling through the list every time to set the basic columns is fairly time consuming, and the workaround (modify a "default" saved list) can be confusing for the less tech savvy - and, from what I can tell, you can't actually "save as a new list" unless you can also save changes to the original.

Totally Agree with Karen.  This makes for a bit of a learning curve for some of our users here, especially any user base that is not very tech savvy.  Furthermore, it is just inefficient.  At the very least, the fields to display should be the first option before the list is even displayed.  But a default would be much better.