A "select top 100 " type of filter would be a much more useful default. I'd probably never change it from that.
I operate a small custom software development company. Customers can go for months to years between changes being made to their software, so this is a very common scenario for me: (1) open up a repository that hasn't been touched in several months (2) go to see the history of the project - more often than not, the changeset view is empty at this point. I then have to make a wild guess as to what date to put in to the filter to get to see something.
Even if the repository is YEARS old, the default view of the change set should show something. Without experimenting and thinking through, I'm not sure what the consequences would be, but certainly when you create a workspace for the first time, you can set the filter to whatever you like, and actually if a literal date is remembered now, then as time goes on with an active project, the list of change sets is going to get longer and longer yet the developers are usually only going to be interested in the top few.