When building a Quick Start for an explore, the default settings are extremely limited. You can apply filter, but you can't predetermine a visual or sort order, so the quick starts can look wonky. If the goal of a Quick Start is to serve as a jumping off point for new users, having a messy first view of the data is not very helpful or intuitive.
I believe you can define a sort order (for both the data, and the order that the fields appear in the explore's data table - you can see the documentation here. I think it actually is pretty flexible and configurable - but I do agree that being able to define a default visualisation is a feature that would add a lot of value here.