It is good practice for accessibility, to provide default form field values. It would be great if FreeForm could check the value of required fields against a ‘NOT’ list when validating.

For example, imagine this required field:

Validation would ensure that the field is not blank, but also that the field value is not equal to “Enter your zip/postal code”, or “ “ (a space).

I am not saying it’s not an option, but you could probably do that with Javascript in most cases.

Yes, you could do it with javascript, but in some cases that would defeat the point of providing default form values, because doing so is aimed at assistive and mobile technologies, which may not support the javascript.