simply choose everything but not HEAD

Indeed! I hadn't really used the panel selector much. It is possible to switch from HEAD to 1/N there, pointing directly at the most recent image.

in my opinion it makes sense to have modules default image set to HEAD because there are often improvements in quality or perspective.

I still think it would make more sense not to default to HEAD. In my experience, updated images are almost always a new panel color or someone uploading a (usually lower quality, and not matching other images from the same manufacturer) image of the actual panel from their rack. If someone uploads a higher quality image, it usually happens within a short time of a module's release, so usually that image is already in the database by the time I'm adding a module to my rack.