Can you change the default view of recorded midi data from piano roll to step sequencer?

Funnily enough this ties in to another discussion happening on these forums about 'MIDI merge', where sound-on-sound recording would add new MIDI events into an old clip instead of creating a new clip, which would simplify this problem, I think.
 
I don't think there is a way to do exactly what you want. And I can't find any way to record in real-time into the Step Sequencer view, either.

No it's not possible to have recordings default to Step Sequencer clips, and I doubt Cakewalk would ever implement this as a feature request because...
 
The challenge for having the Step Sequencer be the default is that it's not a "view" so much as an alternative way of storing and editing MIDI. That's why it requires Convert to SS/Bounce to Clip(s) to go back and forth between them.
 
MIDI clips store start times and durations while SS stores timing offsets from a grid, and information about whether a Note Off is sent at the boundary between two cells or is suppressed so that the note plays through the duration of two or more cells. And Step Sequencer doesn't keep track of the offset of the end of a note from the grid; It always sends note offs right on the grid, at whatever resolution the grid has.
 
Of course the duration of notes doesn't matter for sequencing one-shot samples like drums, which is what SS is really aimed at. So it would hypothetically be okay to have the SS storage model be the default for drum tracks, but I think it would have to be done as an automatic conversion after recording rather than in real time. And if a user accidentally had a regular instrument track set to SS recording mode, the phrasing of durations in a recording would be permanently lost unless the Step Sequencer conversion were immediately undone.