No, actually, you very much DO NOT want auto-save to be on by default.
Consider what a lot of people do: they run their first tournament and it's a success. For their next tournament, they load up the first one, and just reset it. Eventually they save it under a new name, maybe before the tournament starts, maybe during, maybe after the tournament is over. However, if auto-save were on by DEFAULT, it most likely would have auto-saved before they ever got around to saving it under a new name. And presto: they've LOST their first tournament.
There are a lot of variations on this theme. I guarantee there would be a lot more people losing valuable tournament information because of something similar to this, rather than they forgot to turn auto-save feature on.
Turning auto-save on is by design a deliberate action.