When you create a new document, there are countless colors in the Swatches palette.
I have to delete them every time because I define my colors myself and otherwise I lose track.
It would be great if there was a quick way to change this once and for all in the Preferences.

There are a few swatches that I find myself adding to the default swatch panel almost every time I create a new document. I would love to be able to have them permanently added to the drop down swatch panel that appears at the top left of the screen.

Yes, I know we have 'Libraries' and I could import them. Every. Time. But there's a perfectly good swatch panel that could do the job without having to load from the cloud. Also, there are so many patterns and gradients in the default panel that I've never used even once and would like to be able to remove.

I've managed to change the 'Print' default swatches by changing permissions and overriding the original, but it hasn't effected the default swatches.

A related request:
New document without symbols, brushes, graphic styles
http://illustrator.uservoice.com/forums/333657/suggestions/39753427

Mark, I know how you feel exactly, and the topic is very common.
But Illustrator actually offers some legal ways to workaround these.

Open the New Document dialog and scroll down the right column.
Press More Settings button (is actually open the 'legacy' File New dialog).
In this dialog open up the Profile dropdown. Press Browse at the very bottom.
This will open the Select File dialog. What interest us is the actual folder Illustrator uses to store these document profiles.
These are universal templates that contains all the garbage swatches, styles, symbols, etc, — and you can modify these to delete the fluff and add your own presets.
So — grab the file path. On windows it’s something like this:
C:\Users\[USER]\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Adobe Illustrator 27 Settings\[LOCALE]\x64\New Document Profiles

Close all the dialogs (I merely wanted to show you the long way to discover these).
Open the folder in the explorer.
Open Print.ai or Web.ai
Delete all the presets you don’t want to keep (Illustrator has a default action to delete all unused presets — )
Add those you need to use.
You probably won’t be able to save these files directly into this folder, so save them as copies (and backup! — Illustrator has a stupide habit of updating these every major update!) and then paste them over the original ones.
You can also add your own profiles, but it’s hard to pick then using the modern New Document dialog.
Done — all new files will now use presets you added into document profiles.

So actually you request is already completed, it’s just it’s now exactly easy to discover.
Same instructions one the Help site: https://helpx.adobe.com/illustrator/kb/create-custom-new-document-profile.html

Please reply back if it works for you.

The first thing I do every time I create a new document is delete all those default swatches and add my own. And those pattern swatches (e.g., "Jive," "Golden Ring," "Alyssa"), I am literally never going to use those.

And those quirky Graphic styles ("Jive_GS" etc). I am literally never going to use those either.

Ideally, I'd like to load up a document with its swatches, paragraph styles, graphic styles etc as part of the "new document" dialog. I can choose artboard size, bleed, margins, all kinds of things.

How about if I could pick swatch groups, paragraph styles, graphic styles, etc from CC libraries *as part of the new document dialog*?

It's a small thing, but after year after year of deleting the 500 swatches that I will never use - and then adding the six that I need with literally every document I create - seems there could be a smarter way to get started. Know what I mean, Steve McQueen?

the first thing I do with every **** document I create is delete all those prefab swatches and load up my own. I hate that interminable list of prefab swatches *SO MUCH*.

With my workflow, I use swatches to LIMIT my color palette. Starting every document with every single color known to humanity (and a handful of prefab textures I will literally never use) is anti-productive.

Help a fella out here!!

Give users the ability to customize the default swatch library that is automatically added to every new file. The current selection of default swatches can't be changed, and the user should have control over this.

Yes, this is great idea! I wish the swatches panel stayed the same when I open a new file. Its a big deal when you have to work with tens or hundreds of files.

Keep my User defined color swatch settings and not the default selection.

Either move the User Defined swatches option to a faster/accessible place in the Swatches panel, and/or allow the Swatches Panel to keep the previous setup. (It is getting tediously annoying to have to go through the drop-down lists in order to re-select my custom swatch panel and re-insert it in the main Swatch panel, since I do not want multiple swatch panels open.)

Please make this easier.