Installation instructions

[Karl Berry]

    I can remove it if someone can certify that a virgin installation on a 
    virgin OS will correctly default to Letter for Americans and A4 for 
    everyone else, 

No. The default is a4, regardless. I know of no feasible way to make it
geographically based (even if that was desirable, which IMHO it isn't).

As I wrote on https://tug.org/texlive/quickinstall.html, you can change
this by giving the option --paper=letter on the cmdline, or checking the
box in the (gui|cmdline) installer.
    
    and set the MF resolution to HP-300 or something sensible.

The default in TL has always ljfour/600. I just looked at the first TL
(2003) config file and it was ljfour.

    I have no idea why the MF resolution should affect anything nowadays 
    unless someone uses one of the last remaining MF fonts

Right. The Cyrillic lh* fonts being the most likely example.

    I have had installations where it defaults to silly 
    things like Epson 120dpi.

I can't see how that would have ever happened with native TL.
With downstream distributors, who knows. --happy doc-ing, karl.