I considered that option and wondered how many people would need it. I can make it happen in the next beta, so that local recordings too will pick up the default hard padding setting. If you decide to manually override the padding for that recording later within MCE, that will be OK too - we wouldn't keep changing it after the first time we adjust it.
I'm one that would prefer to keep the soft padding in MCE for local recordings. That way I can use IceTV to do my normal recording and hard padding (which is great now by the way), and use MCE for other default recording. Hence, maybe you can make it a tick box in settings as to which type of behavior a user prefers?
Other Requests:- per channel padding settings? To deal with some of the wayward channels. Or instead of totally autonomous padding settings for each channel, maybe to make it easier to handle in Interactive, give us 2 lots of manual padding settings ("Manual Padding 1", Manual Padding 2", "No Padding - Use MCE defaults") and allow us to allocate which channels should use padding 1 and which 2. That way I could have one padding setting of 5 minutes of hard padding for the "good" channels using "padding 1" and 15 or more minutes for the bad ones using "padding 2".
- Determine/set default "Keep Until" behaviour for each of my shows, eg keep until space needed, until watched, until a certain date, or until deleted. (not a high priority, but nice to have when I again start to run of HDD space!)
- Priority of a show (I saw this discussed in another thread somewhere on this Forum). I don't need a 1 to 100 priority. 1 to 5 would do me, but I guess it hardly matters from a programming perspective. But the priority would be used in case there are insufficient tuners available to decide which show will not be recorded. Although I have 4 tuners, sometimes I'd like to record "less important" shows if there are spare tuners. I would set these shows to a low priority.
- There was also a suggestion in another thread to utilise the MCE functionality for series recordings. This is NOT something that I see of any use for me. I'm happy as is. So I guess that is a feature non-request

BTW, how many tuners do we really need these days?
At least 4. 
I agree, at least 4, but 5 would be "nice"

Regards
Wolfgang