While I often see this referred to as a bug, I recall back to a long discussion on the Nuendo forum about this behaviour a while back.
Fredo (Nuendo moderator) replied:
“It is not a workaround. You need initial parameters before you can safely rely on automation. The fact that other DAW’s enable initial parameters by default doesn’t make that the Steinberg system is broken.”
If anyone’s interested, the entire thread is here…