adding support for a default province/state?

location already supports a default country. it'd be nice to allow support for a default state/province, too. nearly all of the locations my site has to deal with are going to be in a single state. if i just disable state/province collection, then the map links don't work. and, it's possible some nodes might need locations outside the primary state. i'd rather collect and store the state/province, but not force everyone to deal with the huge drop-down menu, since 99% of the time, they wouldn't need to change it from the default.

i'm brand new to drupal, module APIs, etc, so my initial attempts to hack this into a test 4.6 installation were unsuccessful. i managed to change location_settings() to ask for and store the default, like it does for country, but in the other places where it's collecting location data, i couldn't get this stored value to be used as a prefilled value anywhere. however, it seems like someone who actually knows they're doing could do this very easily. :) is there any good reason not to do this? i'd be happy to share my initial efforts (though i doubt they're of any value to anyone). alternatively, if someone was patient and gracious enough to help me get up to speed with the location APIs, i could probably finish the task myself. let me know. thanks!!