Untouched fields acting like they are enabled

There is only one field on my site that uses field permission to fine tune it's access, the rest all have their setting left blank. This means those other fields should inherit their permissions "field permissions are inherited from node view and/or edit permissions", however instead they are acting as if they are enabled with no options selected. This means 99% of the field on my site can not edited by a regular user.

While you could go through and explicitly set each fields permissions, this is not the documented behavior to expect. Has anyone else encountered this problem?