* The new empty document created when you launch Inkscape or use File > New is now based on a template instead of being hard-coded into the program. If you want your new documents to have different initial zoom, window size, page border, metadata, etc., just save a document with the desired settings (it may contain some objects, too) as default.svg in your share/templates directory (typically /usr/local/inkscape/share/templates on Linux, $INKSCAPE_DIR\share\templates on Windows).
Later I will make File > New a submenu listing all svg files in templates dir, so that one can have more than one template and choose among them (Ctrl+N will always run default.svg). Now, Mental, you can add a default layer into the default.svg, to get layers going.