"Default Moderation Status" setting under "Publishing Options" for content type not honored

The "Default Moderation Status" setting under "Publishing Options" for content type is not honored. I have set this setting to "Published" because we need our editors to be able to immediate publish a new node. But when we save new nodes, they are still saved as drafts first. This is prohibitively time consuming for us, because our editors have to added hundreds, sometimes thousands, of very simple nodes, and so they don't want to have to go through all the extra steps to publish each node. ...yet we still want the moderation features in case we want to be able to create new drafts of nodes. Please help. Any assistance is greatly appreciated.