Why would the developer be smart enough to tamper with the settings item inside the download setting

Thanks for submitting feedback, we appreciate the care you took to describe your problem. From what I can understand, it appears that you are finding the recent change to support "Open" functionality in downloads to be inefficient. 

In particular, what I am hearing is that you prefer that once you click a donwload link, it asks you where you want to save the file immediately (without having to click "Save as", which requires you to perform one extra click).

The feature team is keeping track of feedback of this type. We made the change because we received overwhelming feedback from people who want the previous "Open/SaveAs" functionality in legacy Edge back yet we didn't want to overcomplicate the settings associated with Downloads, which may confuse users.