I use a lot of pages, not many of them do I actually want displayed on the page bar however. Would be very nice if I could set it to not add pages by default, but have the option of including them manually.

see http://forum.bytesforall.com/showthr...=include+pages

While the Exclude Pages plugin doesn't allow you to set the default behavior it does give you a check box on each page you can check to exclude the page from the menu when creating it.