Leave mandatory custom property drop down fields blank

Our database has historical nodes with Custom Props that we now would like to make mandatory, but currently many are empty (a job on my things to do list to populate these).
If we edit a node with empty (NULL) mandatory fields, the fields will be populated with the first item in the drop down lists. This is unexpected and can easily go unnoticed when editing other parts of the node!!

If a field is not mandatory and a drop down list is used, the first item in the list is "None".

In my opinion, this "None" value needs to be the first item in the list for mandatory fields too, but obviously, if selected, attempts to save the data will fail with a relevant error message. This will force users to enter something, hopefully valid!

Our database has historical nodes with Custom Props that we now would like to make mandatory, but currently many are empty (a job on my things to do list to populate these).
If we edit a node with empty (NULL) mandatory fields, the fields will be populated with the first item in the drop down lists. This is unexpected and can easily go unnoticed when editing other parts of the node!!

If a field is not mandatory and a drop down list is used, the first item in the list is "None".

In my opinion, this "None" value needs to be the first item in the list for mandatory fields too, but obviously, if selected, attempts to save the data will fail with a relevant error message. This will force users to enter something, hopefully valid!

I agree that the mandatory fields should not let a user save the node until they actually select an attribute.  There has been quite a bit of discussion on this and I am hoping that a fix is in the works.