I find the source code view is particularly useful as a dashboard because it gives modification times at a glance for each sub-directory, so as a non-maintainer

I find the source code view is particularly useful as a dashboard because it gives modification times at a glance for each sub-directory, so as a non-maintainer you can tell whether there might be anything of interest to pull down (and possibly reconcile with local changes), without needing to go to that directory on your disk and do the fetch on the command line. So defaulting away from that isn't an obvious solution.